LIB RARYQF QONGRE SS. 

Slielf. v ..pd.4>5 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



STORIES FROM GENESIS 



SERMONS FOR CHILDREN 



Rev. ALFRED G. MORTIMER, D.D. 

Rector of Saint Mark's, Philadelphia 



/sF 1 






NEW YORK 
E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 

COOPER UNION 
1894 



ob Congress 

WASHINGTON 



Copyright, 1894, by 
ALFRED G. MORTIMER. 



TO THE 

CHILDREN OF SAINT MARK'S PARISH 

THESE SERMONS 

ARE 

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. 



&*& 



PREFACE. 



I must ask the kind indulgence of my readers 
for a more personal explanation of the purpose 
of this little book than is usual or necessary in a 
preface. The book is the result of a promise in 
the fulfilment of which I have found more diffi- 
culty than I expected. For while it has been 
one of the privileges and pleasures of my min- 
istry for many years to preach to children every 
Sunday afternoon (excepting during the holiday 
times), yet when I came to attempt to w T rite 
down these sermons I was met with two difficul- 
ties: first, the impossibility of writing in the 
familiar and colloquial style one uses in preach- 
ing to children, interspersed constantly with 
questions, homely illustrations and anecdotes ; 
then on the other hand, I felt that merely to 

give an outline of the sermon would be quite 

(v) 



PREFACE 



useless if the book were, as I intended, to be 
read by children or by parents and teachers to 
their children. I have therefore attempted a 
middle course. The sermons as they stand 
were simply dictated to a stenographer, which 
will account both for the want of fulness of an 
extempore address and the absence of that terse- 
ness and precision which belong to a written 
sermon. The first, as I have said, seemed im- 
possible; the latter, I think, would be unsuit- 
able to children. 

I have added to each sermon an analysis, in 
order that those who care to may try a plan which 
for many years I have found most successful : 

1. I tell the children beforehand what chap- 
ters or passages of the Bible they are to read in 
preparation for the next Sunday's sermon. 

2. At the end of each division, as I preach 
the sermon, in as few words as possible I sum 
up that point (as may be seen in the analysis) 
and make the children all repeat the summary 
together, sometimes two or three times over, 
until they have it quite clearly. I also make 



PREFACE 



them repeat after me any important texts which 
I quote, and where they may be found. At the 
end of the whole sermon we go over together 
all the points, I asking them : " What was the 
first ? What was the second ? What text did 
I quote under this head % " etc. 

3. The next Sunday, before beginning another 
sermon, the children again repeat all the head- 
ings of the last Sunday's sermon. 

The attention and emulation which this stim- 
ulates among the children during the address, 
and the care which is taken by many of them 
during the week to really memorize what they 
have learned, is very striking. The memories 
of children are very quick and they retain 
with great ease such instruction if it be 
practically digested before it is given them ; I 
mean, if the points of the analysis be clear and 
more or less associated with one another by the 
sequence of thought. I have found more than 
a year after in preaching, that they could repeat 
every point of an old sermon. 

Again a mistake which I venture to think is 



PREFACE 



often made is that of confusing simplicity of 
statement with absence of thought. I believe 
children are quite able to grasp a great deal of 
theological truth, if it be clearly put, and, indeed, 
that they take great interest in so doing, and 
that a very valuable foundation of Church teach- 
ing may thus be laid. In these sermons, there- 
fore, on the Book of Genesis, I have not so 
much aimed at telling the familiar stories of 
that most interesting book, as at drawing from 
each one some important lesson and so linking 
with it in the minds of the children, certain def- 
inite teachings as to doctrine and morals. 

Except where needed to give definite point to 
the sermon, I have generally omitted anecdotes, 
because the same ones find a place in almost 
every book of children's sermons and may also 
be found collected in manuals of anecdotes, and 
so can easily be added by each preacher. 

There are many books of children's sermons, 
and yet few seem to meet the need. This little 
book of mine is but an experiment. If it be 
successful, others may follow. 



PREFACE 



To Him Who said, " Feed Iffy lamba," I com- 
mit this work, with the prayer that 1 1 is Bleat- 
ing, which alone can make it helpful, may rest 

upon it. 

ALFRED ft MORTIMER 

St. Mark's Clkbm EfoUHB, 

Philadelphia, 
All Saints, 18M, 



CONTENTS. 



I. Adam and Eve. — I. The Knowledge of 
God, 

II. Adam and Eve— II. The Life of Work, 

III. Adam and Eve— III. Curiosity, . 

IV. Adam and Eve — IV. The Laws of Tempta- 

tion, 

V. Cain— I. Worship, ? 

VI. Cain — II. Responsibility, 

VII. Enoch. Life in God's Presence, . 

VIII. Noah— I. The Obedience of Faith, 

IX. Noah — II. The Three Missions of the 

Dove, 

X. Abraham. Perseverance, . 

XI. Lot. The Dangers of Worldliness, 

XII. Hagar. The Presence of God, . 

XIII. Melchizedek. The Gifts and Claims of the 

Church, 

XIV. Isaac. The Privilege of Suffering, 

(xi) 



I 
ii 

23 

35 
44 
59 
7i 

81 

93 
108 
118 
127 

13^ 
147 



CONTENTS 



XV. Esau. Man's Admiration, God's Aversion, 158 

XVI. Jacob— I. Besetting Sins, . . . .167 

XVII. Jacob — II. The Vision of Heaven, . . 177 

XVIII. Joseph— I. The Coat of Many Colours, . 191 

XIX. Joseph — II. Adversity, . .. . 203 

XX. Joseph— III. Prosperity, .... 214 



ADAM AND EVE.—l 
THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 

4 ' And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking 
in the garden in the cool of the day." — Gen. iii. 8. 

We are going to-day, my dear children, to try 
to learn a lesson from what the Bible tells us of 
our first parents, Adam and Eve. We see them 
in the opening chapters of Genesis surrounded 
by the creatures that God had made, like those 
lower creatures in many respects and yet abso- 
lutely different in one — in the possession of a 
soul created in the image of God. While the 
other creatures in their beauty and usefulness 
reflected God's attributes of Wisdom and Love 
and Power, Adam and Eve had within them 
the very image of God Himself. And as they 
were created in the image of God, so they were 
endowed with many great gifts ; power to hold 



2 ADAM AND EVE [i. 

communion with God, to know Him and the 
creatures around them. And the first lesson 
we will try to learn shall be something about 
their knowledge. 

You, dear children, know how hard a thing it 
is to acquire knowledge. When you were very 
young indeed you knew almost nothing, and all 
that you know now has had to be acquired 
through the laborious processes of experience 
and learning. First, through experience you 
have gained much knowledge about yourself 
and your own little world, and then by being 
taught you have made your own what other 
people gathered by experience and learning. 
And yet I hope you feel, even the oldest of 
you, that however much you know, even if you 
are at the head of all your classes, yet there is 
such an enormous amount still to be learned 
that your little knowledge is like a mere drop 
in the great ocean of Truth. You have parents 
and teachers to help you to learn, to answer the 
many questions which come up in your minds, 
but Adam and Eve had no parents to help them 



I.] THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 3 

and no teachers to answer their questions, and 
yet Adam and Eve had a very great knowledge 
of this world and its powers, and that knowledge 
was the direct gift of God. They knew by in- 
tuition, by God's special gift, what we have to 
learn slowly and laboriously by experience. This 
we see from the fact that we are expressly told 
(Gen. ii. 20) that Adam bestowed upon every 
living creature its name, and undoubtedly the 
names in this case implied some knowledge of 
the nature of the creatures which were brought 
to Adam to be named. We learn something of 
the nature of the different creatures around us 
by watching their habits and living with them, 
but Adam by a direct gift of God was able to 
know and therefore to name each separate crea- 
ture. And we can quite see how necessary this 
must have been, for if Adam had not known 
any more than a little baby the properties and 
powers of the things around him, he would have 
been quite unable to live in the world or to use 
the things which God had placed there for him. 
But this was not the only kind of knowledge 



4 ADA M AND E VE [i. 

that Adam had. It is very necessary that we 
should know something about the things of this 
world and their uses and their dangers, but all 
our knowledge of this world sinks into insignifi- 
cance in comparison with the importance of our 
knowing God ; and Adam knew God. He did 
not only know about God, as children do who 
learn their Catechism and read their Bible, but 
he knew God as children may w T ho pray well ; 
he knew God, that is to say, in the intimate in- 
tercourse of communion with Him, for we are 
told that "They heard the voice of the Lord 
God walking in the garden in the cool of the 
day" (Gen. iii. 8), and this was the great gift 
which they lost to a very great extent by their 
sin. They knew God's Yoice, they loved to hear it. 
It filled them with holy hopes of a great future 
with their Father in Heaven, when their work 
in this world was done, for though they would 
not have died if they had not sinned, yet they 
would not have been left always in the Garden 
of Eden, but when they had passed through 
their period of probation and trial, in some mys- 



I.] THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 5 

terious way — perhaps like Enoch or Elijah — 
they would have been translated to be with God 
in a better world than this. 

How beautiful it is to think of them in the 
cool of the day when their work was over, hear- 
ing God's Voice amid the trees of the garden ! 
They could not see God any more than we can 
see Him, but they could hear His Yoice speak- 
ing to them much more clearly than we can, be- 
cause the ears of our souls have become deaf by 
sin ; so that we have to listen very, very carefully 
and train our ears very, very patiently before we 
can hear God's Yoice speaking to us at all. 

But yet this knowledge of God, which was 
one of their greatest losses in the Fall, has been 
more than restored to us through our Lord Jesus 
Christ. Before He came into the w T orld, the 
world was indeed in darkness and death. Men 
had almost lost the power of hearing God's 
Yoice. Here and there we find some great 
prophet raised up to hold intimate communion 
with God and to bring God's message to man ; 
but now every little Christian child, in the cool 



6 ADAM AND EVE [i. 

of the day, when work is over and before they 
lie down to sleep, in their prayers can speak to 
God, and if they listen carefully can hear God 
speak to them. It is a great thing for you, dear 
children, to learn about God, to learn what He 
has revealed about Himself in the Bible and 
through the Church, and yet it is much greater 
for you to know God in the intimate communion 
of prayer. 

So you see that Adam and Eve had two sorts 
of knowledge, both of them the direct gift of 
God — a knowledge of this world in which they 
lived and of the creatures around them, of their 
powers and nature and use, and, what was their 
great joy, a knowledge of God, the power of 
hearing His Voice directly, that Voice of their 
Father in Heaven, telling them of His love for 
them, of that happy Home which He had pre- 
pared for them, and of their duty and privilege 
of serving Him during their life in this world. 
Both of these sorts of knowledge we may have. 
The first imperfectly ; by the labor of investiga- 
tion we gradually learn to know a great deal 



I.] THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 7 

about the tilings in this world and about their 
nature and use, although, as we have to find all 
this out unaided by God, we often make very 
great mistakes ; indeed every generation of men 
finds out that the last generation was wrong in 
a great many of its theories about this world and 
the creatures in it. We may know too about 
God, and here, if we are humble and try to 
learn, we need make no mistakes, for God has 
given us a revelation about Himself and has 
given us an infallible guide in His Church to 
interpret that revelation, and His Holy Spirit 
in our hearts to help us to understand it. To 
gain more and more of this knowledge of God 
must be the great purpose of our whole life. 
As we learn to know Him better here we shall 
love Him more and trust Him more ; so that the 
knowledge of God will be our greatest interest 
and joy. In this life there is implanted in us a 
great desire to know things, and most people 
spend a very large part of their life in learning 
about things which when they die will be of no 
use to them whatever. When we think of the 



8 ADAM AND EVE [i. 

busy brain of some great student who has stored 
up enormous treasures of facts about the things 
of this world, let us remember that if he has 
neglected the one important science, the knowl- 
edge of God, all else will be of no avail to him 
in the world beyond. In this life we are to 
learn more and more about God, and Heaven 
will be the end of this life, when we shall see 
God face to face and know Him even as we are 
known ; when all those strange mysteries and 
secrets of the universe which excited our inter- 
est and filled ns with awe in this world, will be 
revealed to us in that life which we shall live 
forever in God's Presence in Heaven. Here 
we can know such a little of God ; there we 
shall know God perfectly. 

One of the great Saints of the Church, who 
was himself a very learned man before he be- 
came a Christian and who used all his learning 
in the interests of the Church, tells ns that he 
one day saw upon the seashore near Carthage a 
little child making a pond in the sand and with 
a shell dipping water out of the ocean and pour- 



i.] THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 9 

ing it into his little pond ; and St. Augustine, 
for that was his name, said that it reminded 
him of our efforts to know God's truth in this 
life : that our small capacity could only hold, 
as it were, some few shellsful of divine Truth, 
but that in Heaven there would be a revelation 
of all the great ocean of Truth. 

Now, dear children, in this my first sermon 
on Adam and Eve, we will try to learn just one 
small lesson — the importance of knowing about 
God ; for if we know Him we shall love Him ; 
if we love Him we shall keep His command- 
ments and serve Him ; if we serve Him we 
shall live with Him as His children in the glo- 
ries of that home which is prepared for us in 
Heaven. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Adam and Eve not only differed from all 
the creatures around them in that they were 
made in the image of God, but in the possession 
of special gifts— consider one, knowledge : 

i. We acquire knowledge in two ways, by ex- 



io ADAM AND EVE [i. 

perience arid by being taught ; Adam and 
Eve had it by the direct gift of God. 

ii. They had knowledge not only of the crea- 
tures around them, but of God through 
communion with Him. 

iii. The knowledge which they lost by the 
Fall is restored as regards God through 
the Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

II. These two sorts of knowledge we may 
have : 

i. The first, the knowledge of creatures, only 

imperfectly and after labor, 
ii. The second, the knowledge of God, through 
God's revelation of Himself in the Bible, 
through the Church, and by His Holy 
Spirit in our hearts, 
iii. The one purpose of our life must be to get 
more and more of the knowledge of God 
ready for Heaven, where we shall see Him 
as He is. 



II 

ADAM AND EVE.— II 

THE LIFE OF WORK 

And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the 
garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. — Gen. ii. 15. 

In my last sermon on Adam and Eve we saw 
that the first great lesson their life teaches us was 
the importance of knowing God. Now let us 
learn another lesson from them — the importance 
of Work. 

We are told in the words of my text that they 
were put into the Garden of Eden by God " to 
dress it and to keep it "; so that you see their 
life was not to be a life of idleness. Sometimes 
I dare say children think, " Oh, if I had nothing 
to do how happy I should be ! I should like 
every day to be a holiday.' 1 But, my dear chil- 
dren, those in this world who are idle, who think 
that they have nothing to do, and who do prac- 

(ii) 



12 ADAM AND EVE [n. 

tically nothing, are just the people who are most 
unhappy. They are generally discontented and 
irritable and miserable, taking an interest in 
nothing, and as their life is all holidays it sim- 
ply seems a dreary, uninteresting time. Holi- 
days get their joy from being contrasted with 
working days. 

But perhaps you say, dear children, that work 
is so hard and difficult and you often get so tired 
and do the work so badly that you are only 
ashamed of it when you have done it. Ah, this 
was not the sort of work that Adam and Eve 
had to do before the Fall, when they were in the 
Garden of Eden. They had not sinned, and so 
work was always interesting and always success- 
ful and comparatively without difficulty. They 
were surrounded by a beautiful garden and it 
was their joy and delight to dress it and keep it 
and to see it responding to their loving toil in 
producing everything beautiful and good. Work 
then had none of the disappointments that it has 
now, because work then was work with God's 
blessing resting on it, and so full of most abun- 



ii.] THE LIFE OF WORK 13 

dant results. But when Adam and Eve sinned 
by disobedience, that very work which had been 
their delight became their punishment, for we 
read in Genesis iii. 17-19, that on account of 
Adam's sin God cursed the ground so that it 
brought forth thorns and thistles, and gave 
Adam as part of his punishment that in the 
sweat of his face he should eat bread ; that is, 
that work should no longer be easy and always 
successful, that he should have to toil and labor 
with all sorts of difficulties in his path, that he 
should know what it was to be very tired and 
very weary and still have to go on working, 
and that instead of the ground bringing forth 
abundantly its fruits in response to his labors it 
should often disappoint him, and instead of the 
fruits that he sought there should be thorns and 
thistles and weeds that told of sin. When we 
find our lessons very hard to learn or our work 
very difficult to do, when we are quite tired and 
perhaps our heads ache and we are inclined to 
give up in discouragement, then, dear children, 
let us think, " This is the result of sin ; not only 



14 ADAM AND EVE [n. 

of the sin which Adam committed, but of my 
own sin "; and let us bear it patiently and cheer- 
fully and toil on, remembering that God is watch- 
ing us — toil on lovingly and gladly in spite of all 
our difficulties, realizing that they are the pun- 
ishment of sin, which God in His love gives us 
now to bear, that in that true Home of ours, 
where sin shall be no more, we may enjoy the 
reward of our labor. 

So let us to-day learn a special lesson from 
the words of my text — the charge that God 
gave to Adam and Eve when He put them into 
the Garden of Eden, — that they were to dress it 
and to keep it. Some people have thought of 
the Garden of Eden as though it were absolute- 
ly perfect and there were no signs of death or 
decay, no marks of sin there, and yet this does 
not seem to have been so. The very fact that 
Adam was to dress it and keep it implies imper- 
fection, and that it needed his care. There was 
no sin in Adam, and so his heart was light 
and his labor was full of Joy and power, and the 
garden in which he worked was wonderfully re- 



ii.] THE LIFE OF WORK 15 

sponsive to his efforts ; but there had been sin in 
this world before Adam and Eve were created, 
which left its marks everywhere in the death 
of the lower creatures, for you know we cannot 
conceive of their growth without death. The 
animals could not have lived without food, and 
in getting their food they must have caused 
death to the creatures on which they fed. Sin 
had come into this world before Adam and Eve 
were created, probably from the fall of the An- 
gels, for the Book of Revelation tells us that 
when Lucifer rebelled against God he was driven 
out of Heaven and cast out into the Earth, and 
his angels with him (Rev. xii. 9), and he brought 
sin and imperfection into the lower world around. 
But when God restored the earth which Satan 
ruined, while the marks of sin were still there, 
it was an earth iull of beauty and obedient to 
man's rule, so that Adam's charge to dress and 
keep the garden did not involve the difficulties 
that we have to meet with in our work. 

But, my dear children, God has given exactly 
the same charge to us ; that is, He has given us 



16 ADAM AND EVE [n. 

a garden to take care of and to keep in order. 
Can you guess what that garden is ? Shall we 
say that Eden represents to us our souls, so pure 
and beautiful when God created them in His 
own image, and yet needing such care lest they 
should become all ruined and spoiled ? Think 
of your soul, my dear children, as a beautiful 
garden, capable of producing the most glorious 
fruit and the most lovely flowers, but, alas! 
capable also of growing dreadful weeds. Your 
work is to dress and keep this garden of your 
soul. Let us consider how best you can do this. 
First, there must be the negative work of 
weeding. How fast the weeds grow in a gar- 
den, how hard it is io understand how they get 
there ! Yet we know if our garden is to be 
kept in order we must be continually on the 
lookout to pull up the weeds. So you must go 
into your gardens continually and do a great 
deal of weeding, first by self-examination, to 
find out what are the weeds, the faults of your 
character — weeds in our thoughts, thoughts of 
pri le, vanity, anger, envy, jealousy, and unholy 



ii.] THE LIFE OF WORK 17 

desires ; weeds in our words, impatient words, 
untrue words, irreverent words, perhaps even 
impure words ; weeds in our acts, sins both of 
omission and commission. We must find these 
out by self-examination. We should try to 
make a habit every night of looking over our 
garden to see what w 7 eeds have taken root there 
during the day, and then we must pull them up 
by penitence. 

Then the next thing to do to our garden, 
I suppose, would be sowing good seed. The 
good seed was sown in our Baptism, the germ 
of a Christlike nature ; but besides this we 
must be trying to sow the seeds of all the Chris- 
tian virtues. And then, we know a garden often 
requires watering in order that w-hat grows there 
may not wither away for lack of moisture, and we 
must water our garden by constant prayer, and 
when we are old enough, by the regular use of 
the Sacraments. 

Then Adam and Eve were not only to dress 
the garden, but also to keep it ; and that's the 
hardest part, dear children, for it is com para- 



18 ADAM AND EVE [n. 

tively easy for us in Lent to try to pull up the 
weeds and to sow a great deal of good seed and 
to water our garden with a great many prayers 
and to get it, perhaps, into beautiful order be- 
fore Easter, but it's so hard to keep it so ! When 
the Church's festival seasons have passed away 
and the hot summer-time comes and we are not 
being continually reminded about holy things, 
then it's so hard to watch our gardens and see 
that Satan doesn't come and sow tares among 
the wheat, the seeds of all sorts of sins ; so hard 
to be watchful lest our garden should become 
dried up because we do not water it enough 
with our prayers ! Yes, dear children, those 
who are older than you, I suppose, could tell you 
that it is always harder to " keep it " than it is 
to " dress it." 

And then, just one other thought. For whom 
are we to dress and keep our garden ? For our 
dear Lord. I will give you a text which, when 
you are getting tired of keeping your garden, 
you can sometimes think of : "AwaTce, O north 
wind / and come, thou south / blow upon my 



ii.] THE LIFE OF WORK 19 

garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. 
Let my leloved come into his garden, and eat 
his pleasant fruits" (Cant. iv. 16). Here, you 
see, we learn for whom we work and toil in our 
garden, for our Beloved. And who is our Be- 
loved % Who is it that we love best in all the 
world ? I am afraid some of us, if we tell the 
truth, would have to say, self. Some of us sim- 
ply work and toil for self, and the fruits which 
our garden produces are only the fruits which 
we like, the fruits of self-will. But w T e must try 
to conquer self and remember that we are not 
our own, but " bought with a price "; that the gar- 
den of our soul belongs to our dear Lord, and it is 
to Him that we must say the prayer, "Let my he- 
loved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant 
fruits" We could not dare to say that prayer 
unless we were really trying to have some fruits 
which we knew our Lord would delight in, the 
fruits of charity and humility and purity and 
gentleness and patience and obedience. These 
are the pleasant fruits in which our Lord can 
delight. 



20 ADAM AND EVE [11. 

But our text tells us something more than for 
whom we are to work. It tells us of some one 
who can help us in our labor. What does that 
mean, "Awake, north wind / and co?ne, thou 
south ; and blow upon my garden" 1 It means 
the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of God, for you 
know, in the language in which the Bible was 
written, the words "spirit" and "w 7 ind" are 
the same. The north wind is the Holy Ghost 
as the Spirit of Penitence, blowing upon our 
garden and helping us to kill all the weeds ; 
and the south wind is the Holy Ghost as the 
Spirit of Prayer, enabling us to make Acts of 
Faith and Love and Oblation. We are not left 
to till our garden alone, the Holy Spirit will 
help us. 

And so you see to-day, my dear children, we 
have learned another great lesson from Adam 
and Eve. An enemy came to them in the Gar- 
den of Eden and tempted them to disobey and 
to sin, and then the thorns and thistles began to 
grow. An enemy will come often to us and 
tempt us to disobey and to sin, and then our 



ii.] THE LIFE OF WORK 21 

garden, our soul, will look like a tangled mass 
of thorns and thistles and weeds. We must 
watch and we must work in order that our souls 
may be like Eden, fair and beautiful, a place 
where God may love to dwell, as He loved to 
walk with Adam in the Garden of Eden in the 
cool of the day. If God be in our garden and 
we be striving to keep it always for Him, Satan 
will not be able to get in, for God and Satan 
cannot dwell in the same soul. Satan cannot 
get in unless we listen to his temptation and 
open the gates to him. Let us begin at once 
our work, put our gardens in order, root up the 
weeds, cast out the stones, sow the good seeds, 
water them with prayer, and then watch and 
ask our Beloved to come into His garden and 
dwell w T ith us always. 

ANALYSIS. 

Adam and Eve put into Eden to dress it and 
to keep it. 

I. So their's not a life of idleness, but of work : 
i. What makes work so hard now ? Sin. 



22 



ADAM AND EVE 



[II. 



ii. Adam had not sinned ; so his work was not 

hard, 
iii. The marks of sin in Eden caused by the 

Fall of the Angels. 

II. Our Eden is our souls ; we are to dress 
them : 

i. By weeding ; self-examination and penitence, 
ii. By sowing good seed ; Baptism, Christian 

virtues, 
iii. By watering ; Prayer and Sacraments. 

III. We are not only to dress the garden, but 
to keep it. This is the hardest part, because, if 
we grow careless and do not watch, Satan comes 
and sows Tares, seeds of sins. 

IV. For whom do we work in our garden ? 
For our dear Lord. Text, Cant. iv. 16. 

i. Who is our Beloved ? Our Lord, 
ii. What are His pleasant fruits? Christian graces, 
iii. Who will help us? The Holy Ghost. 
The north wind, the Spirit of Repentance. 
The south wind, the Spirit of Prayer. 
Conclusion. We must work and watch, watch 
and pray, pray that our Beloved may always 
dwell with us. 



Ill 

ADAM AND EVE.— Ill 
CUBIOSITY 

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not 
surely die : for God doth know that in the day ye eat 
thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be 
as gods, knowing good and evil. — Gen. iii. 4, 5. 

We have learned two lessons already, my dear 
children, from the story of Adam and Eve. Let 
us to-day try to learn a third. 

Among the many good things which God has 
implanted in our nature is the passion of Curi- 
osity, the thirst to know. You see I call Curi- 
osity a good thing and given us by God, but it 
is like a sharp tool, very sharp so as to cut 
easily and to enable us to do our work well, but 
if our hand slips and the tool cuts us instead of 
the work, its very sharpness will cause it to 
make a deeper and more dangerous wound. 
Curiosity is one of our greatest gifts, for it is 

(23) 



24 ADAM AND EVE [in. 

the gift which if disciplined makes for knowl- 
edge. It is the gift which enables people to be- 
come wise, to learn ? to conquer the difficulties 
of ignorance ; but its tremendous danger is that 
it often leads us into forbidden paths. Curios- 
ity, guided by the Holy Spirit, will lead ns to 
become wise unto salvation, will lead us to 
search into the deep things of God, will make 
ns love to know all that is good ; but we know, 
alas! too well, that there is another spirit, a 
spirit of evil, the Devil, who will try to guide 
our curiosity into the paths of sin, who will try 
to make us wish to know what is naughty, that 
the very knowledge of which poisons and defiles 
our souls. 

So in the Garden of Eden we are told that 
there was a Tree of Knowledge of Good and 
Evil, a tree against which Adam and Eve were 
warned that they were not to eat of it. How 
hard it is, dear children, to be obedient when 
our curiosity is excited ! How many stories 
there are, of which you all know, in which curi- 
osity has been the great factor leading to sad 



in.] CURIOSITY 25 

and terrible consequences. We all remember 
the story which we listened to with such delight 
when we were very little children, about Blue 
Beard and the key which opened the one closet 
w T hich was not to be entered ; and while that 
was only a fable and we know was not true, 
how like the experience of our life it is, how 
like the experience of every life, even the life 
of Adam and Eve ! There in the midst of the 
Garden was that strange, mysterious Tree of 
Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve 
had a knowledge of good, for they knew God, 
who is Good, and every day they lived they 
learned to know Him better and so knew more 
of good. They had a knowledge of partial 
goodness in the creatures around them which 
God had made for their use. The food which 
they ate w r as good, the beautiful flowers which 
delighted their eyes, the waving grass, the spark- 
ling streams, the birds and insects as they flitted 
about through the air, the stars that shone at 
night, all were good. They knew what good- 
ness w r as ; but evil — what was that ? Of that 



ADAM AND EVE 



they had no knowledge except of the name. 
And so we can imagine Eve wondering what 
this knowledge of evil would be, wondering and 
perhaps talking to Adam about it, and trying to 
imagine what this naughtiness, this sin would 
be in its effects upon them. They knew the 
joy of communion with God, they knew the 
pleasure of communion with Nature, they knew 7 
the strange sensations of delight as they drank 
in the beautiful sights around them in Eden, 
the delicious taste of its fruits. Would a knowl- 
edge of evil be like that % Would it thrill their 
nature with some new delight ? Might it not 
be something even deeper and more satisfying 
than the knowledge of good ? What was it ? 
What could it be ? And all to be within the 
reach of their hand ! One moment and they 
could put forth their hand, take the fruit, eat it 
and know this great secret, open the door which 
w r as to usher them into the mysterious chamber 
of Evil and show them the strange sights which 
w T ere hidden there. And yet God had w T arned 
them that they must not do this, aye, not only 



in.] CURIOSITY 27 

had forbidden them on pain of displeasing Him 
by disobedience, but had told them plainly of 
the terrible results evil would have in their own 
nature — they would die. They thought they 
knew what death was, for they saw animals dy- 
ing around them. Death seemed to them sim- 
ply the end of existence. They thought they 
knew what it was to die, but ah ! they did not, 
for their death meant not only the death of the 
body, but the death of the soul, eternal death ! 
that living death w r ith every craving and appe- 
tite intensified and w 7 ith no possibility of ever 
satisfying it ; that death which was separation 
from God, Who was the joy and end of their 
w r hole being. They did not know this. How 
could they ? God had warned them that if they 
ate of the tree they must die, but Satan came 
and tempted them. As long as they were alone 
they could resist the desire to know, they could 
restrain curiosity, they were held back partly by 
fear of the strange penalty, still more, let us 
hope, by love — love, which made them look 
pon disobedience to God as impossible. 



28 ADAM AND EVE [in. 

But Satan came to them and tempted them. 
And first he suggested a doubt as to the truth 
of God's revelation (Gen. iii. 1.) : "He said 
unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall 
not eat of every tree of the garden f " He called 
in question the truth of God's revelation, 
whether God had really said that, whether God 
had really meant it. He insinuated that it was 
hard that they should not know this wonderful 
secret, and that God could not have meant them 
not to eat of it, that it could not be wrong for 
them to take of it. And so with every sin into 
which curiosity leads us, Satan begins by sug- 
gesting to us that it cannot be wrong for us to 
know about it, that we need not go on to do the 
wrong that others do, but that there can be no 
great harm in our knowing what it is, what 
evil is. 

And then when Eve plainly replied that God 
had said, "Ye shall not eat of it, ... . lest ye 
dier Satan went on further and denied the truth 
of what God had said, and replied, " Ye shall not 
surely die." And so, when we are tempted to 



in.] CURIOSITY 29 

evil curiosity, Satan having first tried to make 
ns think that there will be no great harm in 
knowing, when our conscience rises up and says 
to us, " Yes, but you have been warned that in 
the knowledge of evil great punishment must 
follow," Satan replies, tempting us, " Oh, no, 
there will be no punishment, for you need not 
do anything at all, only you ought to know 
about it." And then, alas! too often we yield 
to the temptation, and that knowledge which 
we then acquire, oh, what would we not give to 
get rid of it ! The knowledge of sin coming up 
in our thoughts to tempt us again and again 
and again, the knowledge of evil leading us not 
to be content merely with the knowledge, but 
to wish to taste it. Adam and Eve not only took 
the fruit, but they ate it, and then the knowl- 
edge of evil coursed through their veins, poison- 
ing their whole life, descending to their children 
and children's children. What a punishment ! 
Not only that they were driven out of Eden, not 
only that they lost that daily communion with 
God, not only that they were punished by having 



3 o ADAM AND EVE [in. 

to toil in the sweat of their face for their daily 
bread, not only that the earth brought forth 
thorns and thistles, but that there was in them 
a strange, terrible knowledge, continually im- 
pelling them to wish to sin. 

In the life of Mahomet, the false prophet, the 
founder of Islam, we read that a certain Jewish 
captive determined, in revenge for the evils 
which Mahomet had inflicted on her country- 
men, that she would poison him. When they 
w 7 ere at Khaibar she made the attempt. She 
cooked a piece of lamb for his dinner and put 
poison into it. Mahomet ate but a mouthful 
when he detected the strange taste and sus- 
pected poison. He ate so little that it did not 
kill him, but the poison got into his system and 
ruined his health, and years and years after, as 
he felt its deadly effects, he used to say that he 
felt the poison of Khaibar coursing and throb- 
bing in his veins. So it is with evil curiosity. 
One may repent of the sin committed and learn 
to hate it, but w r eeks and months, perhaps years, 
afterwards that knowledge of evil will come up 



in.] CURIOSITY 31 

in our memory, tempting us; will, like that 
poison of Mahomet, continue to race, as it were, 
through our veins. 

Again, dear children, let me remind you that 
curiosity is not sin ; no, that it is an awful 
power given us by God to enable us to attain to 
a knowledge of what is good ; but that it must 
be disciplined and guided by His Holy Spirit 
and restrained from ever wilfully tasting the 
forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of 
evil. I say wilfully tasting, because as we grow 
older we shall have to know a great deal about 
evil ; but oh, dear children, put it off as long as 
you can, for that knowledge will sadden your 
lives and make it harder to resist sin. How 
merry and light-hearted is the laughter of an 
innocent child, how pure and unclouded is its 
brow, how clear and fearless is its eye ! But 
when the knowledge of evil comes into life it 
robs us of our light-heartedness, clouds our 
brow with the furrows of care, and it takes away 
from our glance the fearless joy of innocence. 
When we must know it, we must contemplate 



32 ADAM AND E VE [in. 

it as God contemplates it, only to hate it, only 
to realize how evil it is — never, never to taste 
it. The very contemplation of it will bring 
sadness into our lives; to taste it will bring 
poison — the poison of sin. There is enough in 
the world, dear children, to gratify your curios- 
ity without seeking to know evil. The Bible 
tells us (Phil. iv. 8) what we are to seek to 
know, in what paths we may safely exercise our 
curiosity to its fullest extent. Let me read you 
what Saint Paul says : " Whatsoever things are 
true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report ; if there he any virtue, and 
if there he any praise, think on these things" 
(Phil. iv. 8). Aye, think on those things, dear 
children, and your curiosity will lead you to a 
knowledge of God — God, Whom to know is life 
eternal ; that knowledge of which I spoke to you 
before, in my first sermon on Adam and Eve; 
that knowledge which is the interest and joy of 
life here and will make up the happiness of our 



in. J CURIOSITY 33 

life hereafter. But if you allow this keen-edged 
weapon of curiosity to be used in the knowledge 
of evil, and it becomes blunted and spoiled for its 
true use, you cannot find the same pleasure in 
searching into the things of God, in investigat- 
ing what is pure and good, after you have 
spoiled your instrument in investigating the 
things of evil. The power is blunted, the great 
faculty is spoiled and the knowledge of God, 
to which curiosity is intended ultimately to lead 
you, becomes harder, far harder, to acquire. 

And let me remind you in conclusion how 
the danger began. It began by neglecting 
God's warning, by thinking at the suggestion of 
Satan that God did not mean what He said 
when He said, "In the day that thou eatest 
thereof, thou shalt surely die" (Gen. ii. 17). 
It is so easy to persuade ourselves that the con- 
sequences cannot be so terrible before we sin, 
but after we have incurred those terrible results, 
how much we would give to get back our inno- 
cence ! 



34 ADAM AND EVE [in. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Among God's greatest gifts is Cariosity, 
the thirst to know things. 

i. Guided by the Holy Spirit it leads to a 
knowledge of God and of all good. 

ii. Guided by the Devil it leads to a knowl- 
edge of sin, which poisons and defiles the 
soul. 

iii. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil 
in Eden was a great trial to the curiosity 
of Adam and Eve. God had warned 
them, and they resisted until the Devil 
came and tempted them and told them 
God would not punish them as He had 
said. 

II. We may learn that : 

i. Curiosity unrestrained leads to a knowledge 
of sin which embitters life and is itself 
a temptation, 
ii. Curiosity itself is not a sin, the sin is the 
wilful tasting of the knowledge of evil, 
iii. The Bible tells us what to think about. 
(Phil. iv. 8.) 



IV 

ADAM AND EVE— IV 

THE LAWS OF TEMPTATION 

" And when the woman saw that the tree was good 
for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree 
to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit 
thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with 
her, and he did eat." — Gen. iii. 6. 

Once more, dear children, let us try to learn a 
lesson from the history of Adam and Eve ; 
and this time it shall be a lesson on the Laws 
of Temptation. 

If I were asked to sum up in one word the 
story of any person's life in this world, I could 
do it in that one word, Temptation. From 
the time that we know the difference be- 
tween good and evil, that is, from the time of 
our very early childhood to the day of our 
death, our life is one long struggle with temp- 

(35) 



36 ADAM AND EVE [no- 

tation; and in the history of Adam and Eve in 
the Garden of Eden we see the first appear- 
ance of temptation in the arena of the world's 
life, and when we come to examine it, as we 
shall this afternoon, we see that it contains in 
itself the laws of all temptation. We learn 
how much alike all temptations are; how, 
although Satan may disguise himself in many 
ways, he generally uses the same devices to 
lead us to yield to his suggestions. 

As we saw in our last sermon, Satan ap- 
proached Eve through the passion of curiosity, 
a passion altogether good in itself, and yet ca- 
pable of being used in a most evil direction. 
First he persuaded Eve to examine the tree of 
the knowledge of good and evil. He called 
her attention to the fact that it was good for 
food, pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to 
make one wise. Now you know, dear children, 
that when you say your Catechism you say that 
you promised in your Baptism, through your 
sponsors, to renounce the World, the Flesh, and 
the Devil, and you made this threefold promise 



iv.] THE LAWS OF TEMPTATION 37 

because you are made up of three distinct parts, 
each of which is liable to be tempted in its 
own peculiar way. You know what the three 
parts are — body, soul, and spirit. Sometimes 
each one seems to be so entirely yourself that 
you forget in speaking that you have the other 
two parts to make up your entire self. For in- 
stance, when you cut your finger you say of 
the pain, " It hurts me " ; and you mean by 
u me " your body. Then sometimes you say 
(at least, I hope you do), " Now, I will be good 
to-day " ; and by the " I " you mean your soul. 
And then perhaps at another time you say, " I 
have been thinking" ; and you mean the spir- 
itual part of your nature. Although the three 
are so closely connected, so continually inter- 
penetrate one another that it is difficult to sep- 
arate them, yet each has its own peculiar capa- 
city for temptation, and its own special foe to 
tempt it. Your body has those evil appetites 
and desires which you mean when you say, " I 
renounce the sinful lusts of the flesh " ; your 
soul has those companions in the society around 



38 ADAM AND EVE [iv. 

you who influence you to evil, and whom you 
speak of when you say that you renounce the 
world, its pomps and vanities ; and your spirit, 
which you share with the Angels in Heaven and 
those fallen angels whom we call devils, has 
these as the tempters of the spiritual part of 
your nature to whom you refer when you say, 
" I renounce the devil and all his works." 

Sometimes we divide our temptations under 
the three root sins of Sensuality, Covetousness, 
and Pride, and St. John speaks of them in 
his first Epistle as " the lust of the flesh, and 
the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life " 
(1 St. John ii. 16). ]STow if we turn back to 
the words of our text, we shall observe that in 
the first temptation Eve was assaulted in all 
three parts of her nature. She saw the tree 
was good for food ; here it appealed to her 
fleshly appetite. This was the temptation re- 
nounced as " the lust of the flesh" the 
temptation of Sensuality. Then she observed 
that it was pleasant to the eyes ; here we have 
what St. John calls " the lust of the eyes" 



iv.] THE LA WS OF TEMPTATION 39 

what the Catechism calls the " pomps and vani- 
ties of this wicked world," the root sin of Cov- 
etousness* Then when she felt that it was to 
be desired to make one wise, it appealed to the 
spiritual part of her nature, what St. John 
calls " the pride of life" what our Catechism 
calls the very temptation of the devil himself 
the deadly sin of Pride. Some foolish people 
speak of the story of the Fall as though it 
were the mere childish desire to eat a for- 
bidden apple ; but we see that even in the 
most childish temptations the principle of 
evil in all its threefold methods of attack is 
present, appealing to eacli of the three parts of 
our mysterious nature. All three parts in the 
case of Eve were assaulted at once. Her 
fleshly appetites made her wish to eat it ; her 
soul desired to possess it ; her mind longed to 
know the secrets which were hidden in it and 
would be revealed in eating it, and so she took 
it, she disobeyed God and yielded to the sug- 
gestions of the devil ; she took it, and fell. 
But that is not all. No sooner had she sin- 



4 o ADAM AND EVE [iv. 

ned herself than she tempted Adam, and so it 
is a law of temptation that when we sin, either 
intentionally or not, we generally go on to try 
to lead others to sin. 

u And they heard the voice of the Lord God 
walking in the garden in the cool of the day " 
(Gen. iii. 8) — that Voice w T hich they had so often 
heard before, to which they used to look for- 
ward with such intense joy ; that Yoice which 
day by day satisfied more and more of their 
right curiosity, taught them more and more of 
the things which it was good to know. But 
now they had disobeyed God, they had sinned, 
and sin separates us from God, and so they 
heard the Voice with dread, and went and hid 
themselves amongst the trees of the garden. 
How foolish! as if we ever could hide our- 
selves from God ! They hid themselves, but 
God in His love did not allow them to remain in 
their hiding-place. He "called unto Adam, and 
said unto him, Where art thou f " And Adam 
answered, "I heard thy voice in the garden, 
and 1 was afraid, and I hid myself '"(Gen. iii. 



iv.] THE LA WS OF TEMPT A TION 41 

9, 10). Sin makes us fear God, not with that spir- 
it of Holy Fear which helps us to love God, but 
with that spirit of terror which makes us dread 
the very thought of God and try in our folly to 
hide ourselves from the sight of God. 

And God, still in love, leads Adam to con- 
fession ; asks him, "Hast thou eaten of the tree, 
whereof 1 commanded thee that thou shouldest 
not eat ? " and Adam answered, " The woman 
gave me of the tree, and I did eat " (Gen. iii. 11, 
12). How sin makes cowards of us all ! Adam 
in his cowardice tries to put the responsibility 
on Eve. It was quite true that it was she who 
had tempted him, but that did not make his 
sin any less. And so we sometimes in our 
blindness try to persuade ourselves that our 
sins are not our fault, because others tempted 
us; but that will not do at the last great da} r , 
when we shall have to give an account of all our 
sins. We shall each have to stand alone before 
the judgment-seat of Christ, and then we can- 
not make excuses that others tempted us. 

But Adam confessed his sin, and God then, 



42 ADAM AND EVE L IV - 

as now, gave him penance and absolution. 
First He gave him penance, and that penance 
was lifelong. He was to be driven from the 
garden, he was to live in continual enmity with 
the devil and to suffer in the struggle to over- 
come the evil which he had taken into his own 
nature by disobedience ; the very labor which 
had been so interesting and so full of power 
before was now to be accompanied with weari- 
ness and failure. The thorns and thistles, 
which were part of the penance of his sin, 
were to interfere with and spoil his work. 
And yet God forgave Adam's sin. He gave 
him this sad penance before He gave him full 
pardon. He told him of the promise of 
Christ, the Redeemer, through whom alone all 
sin is pardoned, and as we look back to the 
Cross as the source of our pardon, so Adam 
looked forward to it as the means of his. 

So, dear children, we learn something about 
that strange law of temptation which is all 
around us from our childhood to our death, and 
upon our victory over which, our happiness in 



iv.] THE LA WS OF TEMPTATION 43 

Heaven depends. Let us remember that 
there are three avenues to be guarded, body, 
soul, and spirit ; three foes to be conquered, the 
flesh, the world, and the devil, before we can 
gain our prize and win back that Heaven which 
Adam and Eve forfeited by sin. 

ANALYSIS. 

Temptation, the history of human life; its 
laws : 

i. The three parts of our nature liable to 

temptation, body, soul, and spirit, 
ii. The three root temptations, the world, 
the flesh, and the devil ; Covetousness, 
Sensuality, and Pride ; the lust of the 
flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride 
of life (1 St. John ii. 16). 
iii. The tree was good for food, pleasant to the 

eyes, to be desired to make one wise, 
iv. When Eve had yielded she tempted 

Adam. 
v. God called them to confession, gave them 
penance and pardon. 



CAIK—1 

WOBSHIP 

" And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth ? 
and why is thy countenance fallen ? If thou dost well, 
shalt thou not be accepted ? and if thou dost not well, 
sin lieth at the door " — Gen. iv. 6, 7. 

I am going to talk to you to-day, my dear 
children, upon a difficult subject, and yet one 
which it is very important that you should un- 
derstand. The sin of Cain. Sin came into the 
world with Adam and Eve ; then its fatal seed 
was planted in human nature. How rapidly it 
grew, how soon it brought forth its fruits and 
how bitter and evil those fruits were, we see in 
the story of their children, Cain and Abel! 
Adam's sin was against God, an act of deliber- 
ate disobedience in eating of the forbidden fruit. 
Perhaps you think that Cain's sin, on the other 
(44) 



v.] WORSHIP 45 

hand, was against his fellow-man, the sin of 
murder in skying his brother Abel. But I 
w 7 ant to-day to try and show you, dear children, 
that Cain's sin w T as not only the sin of murder, 
that it did not begin with hatred of his brother, 
but it began, as all sin does begin, in disobedi- 
ence to God. 

You know that when David had committed 
his two great sins, by which he broke the Sixth 
and Seventh Commandments, when he repented 
he wrote the Fifty-first Psalm, and said these 
words to God : "Against Thee only have I sin- 
ned, and done this evil in Thy sight" (Ps. li. 4). 
And yet it would seem at first sight to us that 
David's sin was not so much against God as 
against Uriah, whom he caused to be murdered, 
just as Cain's sin was against Abel, whom he 
slew. But it is of great importance, dear chil- 
dren, that w r e should realize that all sin is 
against God in two ways. First, in its essence, 
that is, in its very nature. All sin is against 
God because it is a breaking of God's Law, as 
St. John says : "Sin is the transgression of the 



4 6 



CAIN 



[v. 



law" (1 St. John iii. 4). In our hearts, in the 
Bible and in the Church, God has written His 
Holy Law, and when we break that Law in 
thought, word, or deed we sin against God. 
We may injure and wrong our neighbor by our 
sins, but our sin is essentially against God, be- 
cause it is a transgression of God's Holy Law. 
Even sins in thought against our neighbor, such 
as sins against charity, are against God's Law ; 
for God has commanded us to love our neigh- 
bor as ourselves, and by the same St. John He 
has told us that if we do not love our neighbor 
we cannot love God ; for, "If a man say, I love 
God, and. hateth his neighbor, he is a liar " (1 
St. John iv. 20). If we love God we shall keep 
His Commandments, and His Commandment 
is that we love our neighbor as ourselves. So 
that you see, I hope, dear children, how all 
sins against our neighbor really come back in 
their very nature to being sins against God, 
disobedience to His Holy Law, acts of rebellion 
against His Love. But there is another way in 
which all sin is against God, and that is in its 



v.] WORSHIP 47 

he-ginning, for, as a matter of practical experi- 
ence, all sin hegins by our neglecting our duty 
to God, by forgetf illness of His Presence. If 
we are striving to serve Him in prayer and 
worship, if we love to remember that He is 
always with us, we could not sin against our 
neighbor. If we remember that text, "Thou 
God seest me" (Gen. xvi. 13), at the time that 
we are tempted to sin against our neighbor, I 
am quite sure that we should find it impossible 
to say the angry word or do the wrong deed or 
give way to the hateful thoughts. So we may 
learn here the importance of religion, that is, 
of our duty to God in prayer and worship and 
sacraments, if we are really to do our duty to 
man. People often think, dear children, that 
it is very important to keep the last six Com- 
mandments, to be gentle and loving and pure 
and honest and truthful, but that it does not 
much matter about going to church regularly, 
saying our prayers carefully and receiving the 
sacraments, whereas the truth is that if we do 
not first serve God there is very little likelihood 



48 CAIN [v. 

of our being honest and pure and truthful and 
gentle, for it is in our religions life, in prayer 
and worship and the sacraments that we get 
that grace and strength which alone can enable 
us to do our duty in the world to our fellow- 
men. So we come back to what St. John says, 
that if we do not love God we are not likely to 
love our neighbor, and that if we hate and 
wrong our neighbor the real reason is because 
we do not love God. 

Now, perhaps, you do not see what this has 
to do with the story of Cain and his terrible 
sin, yet I hope to be able to show you that 
Cain's sin illustrates what I have been saying, 
and was the direct result of his neglecting his 
religious duties, or rather doing them in a 
spirit of disobedience. It is very striking that 
right back in the very beginning of the world we 
have so awful an instance of what comes of the 
neglect of God's commands in the duty of re- 
ligious worship. Now I will read you my text 
again, and I must point out to you that one 
word is not quite correctly translated. The 



v.] WORSHIP 49 

text is : "If thou doest well, shalt thou not he 
accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth 
at the door" The word which is twice trans- 
lated " do " means in the original " offer," and 
so the text should read : "If thon offerest well 
{or rightly), shalt thou not he accepted? and if 
thou offerest not well, sin lieth at the doorP 
Directly after Adam's sin, we find that the one 
law of religious worship was the law of sacrifice. 
Man did not dare to draw near to God except 
with some sacrifice or offering, which witnessed 
to his recognition on the one hand of his own 
sin, and on the other of God's justice. Now 
the sacrifice commanded by God seems always 
to have been a sacrifice of animal life. We are 
told that Abel was a keeper of sheep, and these 
sheep must have been for sacrifice, not to feed 
upon ; because it was not until after the flood 
that man was allowed to eat any animal food, 
and this sacrifice of animal life was intended to 
teach man how his own real life had been for- 
feited by his sin, and could only be redeemed 
by the sacrifice of the life of Jesus Christ, the 



50 CAHSF [v. 

Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the 
wwld ; so that Abel, keeping his flock for the 
purpose of sacrifice, had for his vocation a sort 
of priesthood, and Cain had to come to his 
brother Abel to get the lamb w T hich, according 
to God's commands, he had to offer in order to 
fulfil his duty in religious worship, and in com- 
ing to Abel he had in some respects to recog- 
nize Abel's superior position, which was very 
galling to his pride. And so Cain thought he 
would worship God in a different way from 
what God had commanded, and instead of of- 
fering the lamb he would offer the first-fruits 
of the ground, and so escape the unpleasant 
necessity of recognizing Abel's priesthood. 

Cain brought his offering — not what God 
had commanded, not the lamb which pointed to 
our Lord Jesus Christ, but what I dare say cost 
a great deal more than the lamb — the fruits of 
the ground ; and so Cain, you see, made him- 
self practically his own priest and worshipped 
God after his own idea. And God did not re- 
ceive his offering, which made Cain very angry, 



v.] WORSHIP 51 

and then God said the words of my text : " Why 
art thou wroth f and why is thy countenance 
fallen ? If thou offerest rightly, shalt thou not 
he accepted? and if thou offerest not rightly, 
sin lieth at the doorP 

Now, ever since the time of Cain there have 
been two ways in which people have worshipped 
God — either according to God's revealed com- 
mands or according to their own private opin- 
ion. Abel worshipped God with a lamb, as 
God had commanded; Cain, according to his 
own private opinion, thought that the fruits of 
the earth would do just as well. I will not 
take up the time to point out to yon all the dif- 
ferent instances in the Bible of this, but I will 
just mention one or two to show you how strict 
God is about the way in which people worship 
Him. You, most of you, know, do you not? 
the story of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, who 
rebelled against the idea of Aaron's exclusive 
priesthood and thought that they could offer 
incense to God just as well as Aaron could, and 
you know how God caused the earth to open 



52 CAIN [v. 

and swallow them up to show His displeasure 
against those w T ho presumed to disobey Him in 
the way in which they performed their religious 
duties (Numb. xvi.). And then, only to mention 
one other instance, there is the sad story of Uz- 
zah, who put out his hand to save the Ark from 
falling when it was being brought to Jerusalem 
by David in a cart, and was immediately struck 
dead (2 Sam. vi. 6, 7) ; God having said that no 
one was to touch the Ark, and that when it was 
moved it was to be carried in a certain way 
upon poles, and by a certain family of Levites 
(Ex. xxv. 12-16 ; Num. iv. 15). Uzzah thought, 
it did not matter to observe what God had said 
about the ritual of carrying the Ark, and lie 
was struck dead. And so now, dear children, 
there are a great many people in the world who 
will tell you that it does not matter how you 
worship God so long as you are sincere ; that it 
does not matter what religion you belong to. 
But the Bible shows us again and again, from 
the time of Cain right through its whole his- 
tory, that God will not accept worship which is 
founded on self-will and disobedience. 



v.l WORSHIP 53 

God has revealed to us in the Christian 
Church how we ought to worship Him. Now, 
in place of the lamb which the Jews offered, we 
offer the very Lamb of God, our Lord Jesus 
Christ Himself, in the Holy Sacrament of the 
Altar ; that Lamb Which was slain once for all 
upon the Cross of Calvary, and Which St. 
John saw upon the Altar in Heaven just as It 
had been slain (Rev. v. 6), and Which the Priest 
offers supernaturally in union with that Offer- 
ing in Heaven every time he celebrates the 
Holy Communion. Now in this Offering there 
must be a lawfully ordained Priest, and the ser- 
vice used must be the lawfully ordained service 
of the Church. When people who are not 
priests draw near to offer, and use words of 
their own invention, they are doing what Cain 
did, what Korah, Dathan, and Abiram tried to 
do, what Uzzah did. They may be doing it 
quite sincerely, and may think that they are 
doing right, but our thinking that we are doing- 
right does not make a thing right when God 
has said it is wrong. A red Indian thinks it is 



54 CAIN [v. 

right to torture and to scalp his captives, but 
we know that that does not make it right. We 
say, he does it in ignorance, and therefore we 
hope that God may forgive him, but we cannot 
plead ignorance — we who are children of the 
Church, we who are taught the right way to 
worship God. Sectarians may be very good 
people — many of them, I dare say, are better 
than some of us, and we hope that as they think 
thev are ri^ht and their schism is the result of 
ignorance of the truth, that God may accept 
them, but we must be very careful that we do 
not follow their example, because we could not 
plead, as they would be able to, that we were 
brought up in ignorance and never knew any 
better. 

Now, I told you in the beginning of my ser- 
mon that I was going to talk to you about a 
very difficult subject in trying to explain to you 
the sin of Cain, but if you have been very at- 
tentive I hope you have been able to under- 
stand it. Cain's sin began by neglecting his 
duty to God in his religious worship, wor- 



v.] WORSHIP 55 

shipping God in the wrong way through 
pride and unwillingness to recognize Abel's 
position as the Priest of the family, and God 
refused to receive his offering, and then when 
Cain was cut oft* from God's grace he got very 
angry, and having no grace from God to help 
him to restrain his anger, he gave way to it and 
murdered his brother. Then what a terrible life 
was his ! With the mark of God upon him, with 
the brand of sin upon his brow, with his brother's 
blood upon his soul, wandering through the 
earth ! and it all came from what ? — neglect of 
his duty to God. O, my dear children, if only all 
through our lives we are careful to do our duty 
to God, careful to say our prayers every morn- 
ing and evening, careful to repent of our sins 
and to seek pardon for them, as the Church 
teaches us, careful to come regularly, when we 
are old enough and are confirmed, to the Holy 
Communion — if only we do this all through 
our lives, we are not likely ever to fall into any 
great sin. Great sin almost always means that 
we have first turned away from God, given up 



56 CAIN [v. 

our religious duties, given up, for instance, our 
Communions, or have neglected to repent of 
our sins, or have said our prayers very care- 
lessly, or perhaps not at all. In all these cases 
we are fighting in our own strength, fighting 
without God's help, and that can only end in 
one way — we fall into grievous sin. We may 
not be tempted to commit the great sin of mur- 
der, as Cain was, but there are other great sins 
which will kill our soul and to which we are 
liable to be tempted any day. Do not let us 
dare, dear children, to go out to the battle of 
life unless we are quite sure that we have 
God with us, quite sure that we are striving 
first of all to love God, and you know our 
Lord Jesus Christ says that if we love Him we 
shall keep His Commandments, and one of His 
Commandments is that we shall worship Him 
according to the way which He has revealed to 
us in His Church ; not according to our own 
private opinions, but in holy obedience to that 
Law which He has written in His Church. No 
sin in our eyes is greater than murder, no mur- 



v.] WORSHIP ■ 57 

der can be worse than the murder of one's own 
brother, and the murder of Abel came from 
neglect of religious duties and disobedience to 
God's Law on the part of Cain. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. All sin is against God in two ways : 

i. In its essence and nature ; we may injure 
our neighbor, but we only sin against 
God. 
ii. In its beginning : it is the result of forget- 
ting God, of breaking His commands. 
So we learn that in order to do our duty to 
our neighbor we must first do our duty to 
God. 

II. When Adam sinned God ordained the 
law of sacrifice, the lamb which pointed to 
Christ. Abel kept his flock for this. Cain re- 
sented having to get the lamb from Abel, of- 
fered what God had not commanded, and his 
offering was rejected, then in envy and anger 
he murdered Abel. 

III. People can worship God in two ways : 



58 CAIN [v. 

i. According to His revealed commands in 
the Church. 

ii. According to their own private opinions. 

In the history of Cain, Korah, and Uzzah we 
see how God punishes such self-will. 

IY. In the Church, God has revealed how 
we are to worship Him, by offering the Lamb 
of God in the Holy Eucharist. If we are care- 
ful in our religious observances in prayer and 
worship we are not likely to fall into any very 
great sins, but if we neglect these it may be the 
beginning of any sin. 



VI 

CAIN-II 

RESPONSIBILITY 

"And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy 
brother ? And he said, I know not : Am I my brother's 
keeper ? " — Gen. iv. g. 

You all know who spoke these words and after 
what terrible sin they were spoken. When 
Adam sinned he went and hid himself , but God, 
in His great mercy, called him from his hiding 
place and asked him those questions which led 
him to confess his sin. So it was with Cain. No 
sooner had he murdered his brother Abel than 
God, who, while He is all Just is also infinitely 
Merciful, asked him those questions in my text 
which would have made it so easy for him to 
have confessed his great sin. God asked him, 
" Where is Abel thy brother i " and Cain lied 
— lied, dear children, to God, Who sees and 

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6o CAIN [vi. 

knows all things — lied, and said, " I know not"; 
and added, half in defiance, half in excuse, 
" Am I my brother's keeper ? " and this was 
just after he had murdered his brother ! 

You see, then, how Cain added one sin to an- 
other. First there was the sin of Pride, which, 
as I told you in my last sermon, kept him from 
seeking the lamb for sacrifice, as God had com- 
manded, because he had to get it from his 
brother Abel, and so to recognize his brother's su- 
periority. Then came the two children of Pride, 
Envy and Hatred, because Abel was better than 
he and so God accepted Abel's offering while He 
refused his. Then the offspring of Envy, Mur- 
der ; and then the child of Murder, Lying, and, 
worst of all, lying to God Himself. 

So it almost always is. Sin rarely stops at 
one act, but is generally most prolific in its off- 
spring, and this is especially the case with the 
sin of lying. It is very rarely a root sin, and so 
you find that it is not mentioned either in the 
Ten Commandments or among the Seven Deadly 
Sins, because it may come sometimes under one, 



vi.] RESPONSIBILITY 61 

sometimes under another. Here you see, if we 
take the sin of lying, which is the sin brought 
before us in this particular verse, we can trace it 
up through its terrible pedigree back to the sin 
of pride ; and, indeed, lying generally (though 
not quite always) can be traced back to that sin, 
to pride. What a shameful ancestry ! The first 
parent Murder, the grandparents Envy and Ha- 
tred, the great-grandfather Pride, that sin which 
caused the fall of the Devil ;- that sin which even 
now in us is so absolutely universal that it is like 
a drop of poison spoiling the best actions of 
most of our lives. 

But we will turn away from Cain's sin and to- 
day consider simply God's question and Cain's 
excuse. God asked, "Where is Abel thy 
brother?" and Cain replied, "Am I my 
brother's keeper % " 

This brings before us, my dear children, the 
solemn question of our responsibility for other 
people's sins. I mean, of course, for those sins 
of other people which we have in some way been 
the cause of, or which we might by some word 



62 CAIN [vi. 

or action of our own have prevented. We 
might plead that we do not make our compan- 
ions sin, even though we may tempt them by 
word or example, that they have free-will and 
that they need not sin unless they choose, and so 
it is their fault and not ours if they sin. But I 
do not think any child could make this excuse 
without feeling that it was a very poor excuse 
indeed. It is so hard in this world of sin to 
keep ourselves pure, so hard to resist the temp- 
tations that are without us, within us and all 
around us, that we need to help one another in 
every possible way to stand against temptation, 
and never, never to put temptation in a brother's 
way. 

But perhaps the best way to study this im- 
portant question will be to take two texts from 
the New Testament which teach us, I think, very 
clearly, first, our negative duty of abstaining 
from injuring our brother's soul by word, act, or 
example, and secondly the positive duty of help- 
ing our brother, when we have the opportunity, 
to bear his burdens and trials and temptations. 



vi.] RESPONSIBILITY 63 

The first text you will find in St. Matthew xviii. 
6, 7 : " Woe unto the world because of offences ! " 
Have you ever thought, my dear children, that 
these were the most terrible words that our 
Blessed Lord ever spoke? for while it is true 
that He uttered other woes when He said, " Woe 
unto thee, Chorazin I icoe unto thee, Beth- 
saida ! " yet here, see how He qualifies it with 
those words, referring to him by whom the 
offence should come, "It were better for him that 
a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that 
he were drowned in the depth of the sea" Not 
only better that he had never been born, but 
better that he were drowned ; not only better for 
the one whom he had offended, but better for the 
man himself. It must indeed have been a sin 
of no ordinary guilt, a crime of the deepest dye, 
which could wring from the tender Lips of our 
loving Lord Himself such words as these. And 
what was this sin of "offences"? I must ex- 
plain to you the meaning of the word. The 
word " offence " in the Greek is a word which 
signifies " to put a stumbling-block " in another 



64 CAIN [vi. 

person's way, something for them to fall over. 
I read not long ago, at the time of the great 
strike in Chicago, of some wretched men who 
removed the bolts from the rails and put some- 
thing on the rails to cause the trains to run off 
the track ! Just think how cruel, how wicked, 
to send into eternity, perhaps, without a mo- 
ment's notice, numbers of people, all unpre- 
pared, men and women, and even little children, 
who were riding along in fancied security, full 
of life and spirits and talking perhaps gaily of 
the home to which they were going or of the 
excursion which they were making, and never 
dreaming for one instant that any human being 
could be so fiendish as to wreck the train and 
injure in life and limb those who had never 
harmed them in any way, those whom they had 
never even, perhaps, known! If such a man 
were caught, what do you think ought to be done 
to him ? Do you not think people would say no 
punishment was too great for such a villain ? 
Do you not suppose that the parents of the lit- 
tle children to whom he had brought death or a 



VI.] RESPONSIBILITY 65 

life of suffering would take the direst vengeance 
upon him? Do you not feel that the whole 
community would rise up with one accord to 
punish such a man ? Yet this is exactly what 
our Blessed Lord meant when He said, " Woe 
unto the world because of offences ! " only that 
He was thinking of injury to the moral nature 
instead of the physical, He was thinking of 
killing souls instead of killing bodies. Oh, my 
children, when we are inclined with one burst of 
indignation to condemn any one who could com- 
mit such a crime as I have been describing, let 
11s pause and ask ourselves, " Have I ever been 
guilty, through thoughtlessness, of something 
very similar % Have I ever by my words or acts 
put stumbling blocks in the way of other children, 
which have caused them to go astray from the 
right path, which have wrecked their lives ? 
Have I ever taught them what they ought never 
to have known ? Have I ever sowed in the 
garden of their young hearts tares which they 
will never be able entirely to root up ? And 
if so, have I not been guilty of very much the 



66 CAIN [vi. 

same sin that Cain committed ? " And — most 
dreadful thought of all, my dear children ! — 
when in God's love we hear His Voice calling 
us to repentance, calling us to confess our own 
sins; when perhaps we are older and obey 
that Yoice, and feel sure that our sins are for- 
given, that He who is so infinitely loving for- 
gives us all our sins — then there comes up that 
terrible question, " Where is thy brother ? " — 
thy sister, whom you taught evil, whom you 
laughed out of religion, whom you set an ex- 
ample of wordliness ? " Where is thy brother ? " 
And perhaps, dear children, we may have to 
answer with truth, " I know not ; I have lost 
sight of them in the great stream of life ; they 
have gone one way and I another. By God's 
great goodness I have been led to repent of my 
sins, but whether they have repented or not, I 
know not." Oh, when you are tempted to talk 
about bad things before other children, when 
you are tempted to laugh, perhaps, at religion in 
others, remember, dear children, remember these 
words of our Blessed Lord, " Woe unto the world 



vi.] RESPONSIBILITY 67 

hecause of offences ! " Remember God's ques- 
tion to Cain, " Where is thy brother f " and 
Cain's answer, " 1 know notP 

The other text you will find in the second 
verse of the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the 
Galatians : " Bear ye one another's burdens, and 
so fulfil the law of Christ" Here we have a 
positive precept in regard to our duty to our 
brother. Not only are we most carefully to 
abstain from putting stumbling-blocks in our 
brother's way — not only shall we have to answer 
at the great Tribunal of God if we have in any 
way injured our brother's soul, but if we are to 
"fulfil the law of Christ " we must do some- 
thing more ; we must strive to help him to bear 
his burdens, to carry his cross, to resist his temp- 
tations, to fight his battles, to win his crown ! 

My children, let me tell you what is the great- 
est joy in life. It is not the possession of much 
money, it is not the winning of great popular- 
ity, it is not even the love of good friends. It 
is the privilege of being allowed to help another 
soul on its road to Heaven. "Bear ye one 



68 CAIN [vi. 

another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of 
Christ^ Do not be always talking about re- 
ligion. Pray do not in the least try to seem to 
be what you are not in religious matters, but just 
watch your opportunity, serve God yourself with 
all your heart and soul, and w^hen the opportu- 
nity comes speak a word for Him, your Master, 
your Lord, Whom you have learned to love. 

Many, many years ago I was told of a Priest 
who was called to visit a dying man, and he 
heard his confession and prepared him for death, 
but the dying man said to him : u The one thing 
which troubles me more now even than the 
great sins of my life, is a trick that I played when 
I was a boy. Not far from where I lived was 
a large Common, in the middle of which two 
roads met, and at these cross-roads a rickety sign- 
post directed the traveller to his destination. 
The arms of the sign-post were loose, and one 
day, for fun, I took them down and changed 
them, so that they pointed out the wrong road ; 
and now that years have rolled by and I am dy- 
ing, it worries me greatly to think how many a 



vi.] RESPONSIBILITY 69 

poor, weary traveller across that Common I sent 
on the wrong road." 

Oh, my dear children, remember, the time will 
come when we shall all have to die, when we 
shall have to make our last self-examination of 
all the great sins of our life. God grant, then, 
that we may not have to recall that we have sent 
others in the wrong road — others, pilgrims like 
ourselves, who looked to us, perhaps, for guidance, 
and we pointed them, by our life, by our words, 
by our example, in the wrong way, in the way 
that led away from Heaven. Dear children, be 
yourselves sign-posts pointing Heavenward, for 
the day will come when G-od will ask you the 
question, " Where is thy brother ? " when you 
will have to give account not only for your sins, 
but for your gifts, for your opportunities, for 
your power of influence. Let us so use that mys- 
terious power now that in that Day there may be 
many with us on the right hand whose burdens 
we have helped to bear, whose feet we have 
helped to guide in the paths of peace ; that there 
may be none on the left hand whose souls we 



70 CAIN [vi. 

have murdered, as Cain murdered his brother 
Abel. 

ANALYSIS. 

Introduction. — Sin is generally prolific in its 
offspring. Trace the pedigree of Cain's lie to 
God. 

I. — Our responsibility for other people's sins, 
through temptation, or neglect to use our oppor- 
tunities of helping them. 

i. The negative duty of not tempting another. 
" Woe unto the world because of offences." 
(St. Matthew xviii. 7.) Offences=stum- 
bling- blocks, 
ii. The positive duty of helping others when 
we have an opportunity. "Bear ye one 
another's burdens^ and so fulfil the law 
of Christ." (Gal. vi. 2.) 
II. — The greatest joy in life to help another 
soul. Let us remember the Last Day, when we 
shall be asked, " Where is thy brother f " 



VII 

ENOCH 

LIFE IN GOB'S PBESENCE 

" By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see 
death ; and was not found, because God had translated 
him : for before his translation he had this testimony, 
that he pleased God."— Heb. xi. 5. 

We come now, my dear children, to a very 
mysterious character, one of whom we are not 
told much, for indeed all we know of him is 
contained in three verses of the Bible. In the 
twenty-fourth verse of the fifth chapter of the 
Book of Genesis, where we are told that "Enoch 
walked with God : and he was not / for God 
took him"\ in the fourteenth verse of the 
Epistle of St. Jude, where we are told that 
"Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophe- 
sied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh 
with ten thousands of his saints"; and in this 
verse of my text, where we learn that "Enoch 

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72 ENOCH [vii. 

was translated that he should not see death 



j 



and was not found, because God had translated 
him : for before his translation he had this tes- 
timony, that he pleased God" We are not 
told much about Enoch, and yet I think we may 
learn some very valuable lessons from his life. 
In the first place, he was a type of our Blessed 
Lord in his Ascension, that is, he was trans- 
lated, or taken up to Heaven alive, and in this 
way typified our Lord's Ascension. 

No sooner had Adam by his sin forfeited 
Paradise than God in His mercy and love prom- 
ised a Redeemer. You know, dear children, 
the first prophecy was uttered even before the 
sad sentence was passed upon Adam for his sin, 
when God said to the serpent, " I will put en- 
mity between thee and the woman, and between 
thy seed and her seed ; it shall bruise thy head, 
anfid thou shalt bruise his heel" (Gen. iii. 15). 
This was the beginning of a long chain of 
prophecies, which prepared the world for the 
coming of our Blessed Lord, but it was not only 
by prophecy that our Lord taught people to look 



vii.] LIFE IN GOD'S PRESENCE 73 

forward to Him, but also by what we call 
"types," that is, He caused the lives or parts of 
the lives of certain great heroes of Old Testa- 
ment history to anticipate, as it were, certain 
aspects of His own life and work. Indeed, so 
deeply impressed were Adam and Eve, after 
their sin, with the hope of our Blessed Lord's 
speedy Advent, so earnestly did they look for 
it, even in their own lifetime, that when their 
first child was born, Eve called him Cain ; for 
she said, " I have gotten a man, the Lord." This 
shows that they hoped and expected that this 
child might be He who was to be their Saviour. 
So at all times in their history, devout Jews 
have expected the coming of the Messiah. Then 
the next child, Abel, was a type of our Lord in 
his Passion, being slain through envy by his 
brother ; and Noah was a type of our Lord in 
many ways, but especially in the Resurrection — 
when all the world died by the flood, Noah 
came forth alive from the Ark — and Enoch, as 
I have just said, was a type of Christ in the 
Ascension; so that you see God ordered 



74 ENOCH [vn. 

many men's lives as types to point people to 
Christ. 

But not only was Enoch a type of Christ, but, 
as St. Jude tells us, he also prophesied of Christ, 
for he prophesied, "Behold, the Lord cometh 
with ten thousands of his saints " ; and in the 
same verse, the fourteenth verse of St. Jude, 
our attention is called to the fact that Enoch 
was the seventh from Adam, and if we turn to 
the fifth chapter of Genesis we shall find it so — 
Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, 
Enoch, there we have them, seven in all ; and 
the number seven symbolizes perfection and 
rest, and Enoch's was the first perfect life and 
was a life of rest, for he walked with God. All 
around him the world was getting worse and 
w r orse every day and the strife and turmoil of 
sin was everywhere, but he walked with God in 
a perfect life, and so found rest amid the strife. 

Now, dear children, let us notice some things 
which belong to such a life as that of Enoch, 
and which we must try to imitate if our life is 
to be in any way like his. 



vil] LIFE IN GOD'S PRESENCE 75 

First, it was a peaceful life. You will re- 
member, when our Lord was crossing the Lake 
of Galilee with the Apostles in a little fishing- 
boat, He was fast asleep in the stern while 
the storm raged and threatened to wreck the 
boat. The Apostles became very much fright- 
ened and went and awoke Him, saying, "Master, 
calmest thou not that we perish ? And he aldose, 
and rebuked the wind, and said unto the sea, 
Peace, be still. And the wind ceased, and there 
was a great calm " (St. Mark iv. 38, 39). So it 
is with all our lives. The storm must be around 
us, the winds and the waves of temptation ; the 
forces of the world, the flesh and the Devil will 
strive to wreck us, and sometimes when tempta- 
tion becomes very strong or lasts an unusually 
long time, we, like the Apostles, get frightened ; 
but if our Lord Jesus Christ is in our heart, if, 
like Enoch, we are walking with Him, we need 
not fear, for though the storm may rage around 
there will be peace, perfect peace, within us. 
We, if we are walking with Christ, may say in 
the words of the Psalmist : " God is our hope 



76 ENOCH [vii. 

and strength, a very present help in trouble. 
Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be 
moved) and though the hills be carried into the 
midst of the sea / though the waters thereof 
rage and swell) and though the mountains shake 

at the tempest of the same God is in 

the midst of her) therefore shall she not be re- 
moved: God shall help her) and that right early " 
(Ps. xlvi. 1, 2) 3, 5). A life of peace, because 
the Prince of Peace is reigning in our souls, be- 
cause we have taken Him for our Lord and our 
King. Peace ! How those who are striving in 
the world long for it! How impossible it is 
to have a happy life without it ; yet how few 
seek it where alone it can be found, in the 
Gift of Jesus Christ! "Peace I leave with 
yoU) my peace I give unto you : not as the 
world giveth) give I unto you. Let not your 
heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid " (St. 
John xiv. 27). Only let us follow Enoch in 
walking with God, and we shall with Enoch ex- 
perience the blessings of Peace. 

Secondly, his life was a life of union with 



vii.] LIFE IN GOD'S PRESENCE 77 

God, for we are told " he walked with God," 

and, " Can two walk together, except they he 

agreed?" (Amos iii. 3). And what does this 

mean but a union of wills ? All our sin, all our 

unhappiness, we can trace to our own self-will. 

Our Lord Himself has taught us to say as the 

very central petition of His Prayer, " Thy will 

be done in earth, as it is in Heaven "; and when 

we have learned not only to say this in prayer, 

but to love it as the true law of our life, that is, 

when our will is so blended with God's Will that 

our only wish is that His Will may be done, then 

will be the true life of union. God's Will is the 

great power which moves the universe, as we 

are told in the Gospel that not one sparrow falls 

to the ground without God's Will ; but His Will 

is not only All-Powerful, but All- Wise. He can 

never will anything that is not for the very best, 

and so when we pray that His Will may be done 

in us, we know that that means the very best 

and wisest things for us. Enoch walked with 

God in the union of an undivided will. So 

everything in Enoch's life was beautiful and 



78 ENOCH [vii. 

perfect, because it was ordered not by man's self- 
love, but by God's Omnipotent and All-Wise Will. 

Thirdly, Enoch lived in the great future. He 
could not walk with God and place his hopes in 
this dying world. He knew that a,t the longest 
his days here must be few. He knew that of 
all that he might amass during his lifetime on 
earth he could carry nothing away with him, 
and so he lived in the great future, in that other 
world where his true Home was, in that other 
world where God was all in all. All the deci- 
sions of his life were made with relation to this 
great future ; all its sorrows and joys were borne 
in the realization that they were but for a mo- 
ment and that they must be judged and valued 
only with reference to their helpfulness or 
harmfulness in the life to come. 

Dear children, we must try to live like this ; 
to remember that earth is not our home. It is 
not much use singing beautiful hymns about 
Heaven unless we are really trying in our every- 
day life to live for Heaven, unless we are trying 
to live as though our life on earth were indeed 



vii.] LIFE IN GOD'S PRESENCE 79 

a time of exile, as though we were indeed 
strangers and pilgrims, passing through a foreign 
country, with all our hopes fixed upon our own 
true native land, upon our own dear Home in 
Heaven. This was Enoch's lesson to the world. 
His life is summed up in but a few words in 
this chapter of Genesis. We are told of no 
great things he did or suffered, only he lived for 
God, he pleased God, and that as his reward he 
was translated directly to that Kingdom of Love 
w T hich was always the goal of his life, the end of 
his hopes. It will not be said of us, as of Enoch, 
that God translated us to Heaven. We shall 
have to pass through the grave and gate of 
death, but it may be said of us, if we do our 
part, what is more important, and what was 
said of Enoch, that we walked with God, and 
that we had this testimony, that we pleased God. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Enoch is mentioned three times in the 
Bible, Gen. v. 24, Heb. xi. 5, and St. Jude 14. 

II. He was a type of our Lord in His Ascen- 



80 - ENOCH [vil 

sion, as Abel was of the Passion and Noah of 
the Resurrection. 

III. Let us notice three things in Enoch's 
life which we must try to imitate : 

i. It was a peaceful life, while all around was 

strife, 
ii. It was a life of union with God and there- 
fore of conformity to God's Will. 
iii. It was a life lived in the f uture, in the hope 
of Heaven. 



VIII 

NOAH— I 

THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH 

"Thus did Noah ; according to all that God com- 
manded him, so did he."— Gen. vi. 22. 

After the sin of Cain the world grew rapidly 
more and more wicked. Men seemed to have 
forgotten God altogether and simply to live for 
the gratification of their own desires. At last 
the world became so full of sin that God in His 
wisdom determined to destroy it by a flood, in 
which only a small remnant should be saved; 
and that through this remnant should come the 
chosen race of which our Lord Jesus Christ was 
to be born. God gave to Noah, the only just 
man in the wicked world, a revelation of His 
purpose ; told him how He was going to punish 
the sin of man by a flood, and told him also of 

(81) 



82 



NOAH 



[viii. 



the means by which he should be saved, that is, 
by building an Ark in which he and his family 
might find refuge until the waters of the Flood 
had subsided. 

Here, dear children, we learn that God seldom 
punishes without warning us of the punishment 
which is coming. Not only did God tell Noah, 
but God made Noah " a preacher of righteous- 
ness " to tell others, to warn them first of the sin 
of forgetf ulness of God, of breaking His Laws, 
which made this fair world so unpleasing in 
God's sight, and then of the terrible punishment 
w r hich God was about to send upon those who 
neglected His warnings, who practically defied 
their God. So it is with us. God warns us of 
the effect of breaking His Commandments ; God 
tells us of the punishment which awaits those 
who continue to do so. Month after month, as 
we say our Psalter in Church, we hear read that 
verse, " The wicked shall he turned into hell, 
and all the people that forget God " (Ps. ix. 
17). Sometimes perhaps we think that if we 
had lived in the time of Noah and had seen 



viii.] THE OBEDIENCE OF FATTH 83 

him building the Ark and had heard him fore- 
telling the approaching Flood, we should cer- 
tainly have repented and joined him in his 
work. But now we hear continually preaching 
which tells us of that law, that all unforgiven sin 
must be punished, and exhorts us therefore so 
to repent that our sins may be blotted out in the 
precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, — ev- 
ery church building which we pass reminds us 
of God's claims on us; every service which we 
attend, I might say, every prayer that we say ! 
And yet, how often we go on in forgetf ulness of 
God, in the same habits of sin, which we know 
are so displeasing to God. 

But Noah believed God's words, and showed 
that he believed them by setting to work at once 
to build the Ark, so that he was " a preacher of 
righteousness " as St. Peter tells us (2 St. Peter 
ii. 5), not only in words, but by his actions, for 
he showed that he believed the truth of God's 
revelation. It must have required, my children, 
no little faith, no little courage, no little perse- 
verance to go on building the Ark. Remember, 



84 NOAH [vm. 

the building occupied many years, and through 
all this long time the sun rose and set, the days 
looked fine and beautiful, just as they do now, 
men went on with their work and with their 
pleasure, people were born and died. Noah said 
the end was coming, yet there seemed no sign of 
it. It was all, dear children, just as it is now. 
Noah had faith, and in spite of the jeers of those 
who thought he was insane, he simply obeyed 
God's commands and went on building. He not 
only believed God^ words, you see, but he acted 
on his belief, but others went their own way. 

It would be very difficult to find any greater 
lesson — I mean, any lesson which we need more 
to learn — than this, the importance of acting on 
our belief. If any one were to ask us if we be- 
lieved the words of Jesus Christ, I am sure that 
most of us would say at once, " Why, of course 
I do " ; and we should be most indignant if any 
one for a moment suggested a doubt on the sub- 
ject. But, dear children, if I ask you the further 
question, "Do you act upon your belief? Do 
you show your faith by doing w T hat Jesus Christ 



viii.] THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH 85 

commands you?" you would have to hesitate, 
and, I am afraid, sadly say, "No; not always." 
If I asked you, "Do you love Jesus Christ?" 
you would say, " I hope so " ; and then when I 
reminded you that almost the last thing He said 
before He died for you was, "If ye love Me, keep 
My commandments" and I go on to say, " Do 
you keep His commandments ? Are you pure 
and humble, honest and truthful ? are you unself- 
ish, ready to help one another and to bear will- 
ingly the Cross? What answer must you give? 
When people scoff at you for being religious, 
when your schoolfellows, perhaps, call you 'a 
saint' because you are trying to be good and 
obey Jesus Christ, do you get discouraged and 
give it up ? " Think of all the jeers, of all the 
scoffs, of all the taunts that poor Noah must have 
heard during those long, long years that he was 
building the Ark ! The days perhaps seemed to 
grow brighter and the birds to sing more joy- 
fully as the end approached, and people pointed 
to this and laughed at Noah ; but Noah believed 
and did as God had commanded, and went on 



86 NOAH [vm. 

building, as my text says, "According to all 
that God commanded him, so did he." 

And so it must be with us. The faith which 
does not show itself in action is no real faith at 
all. A love which does not lead us to obey 
Jesus Christ is no real love at all. We must 
strive to " examine our lives by the rule of God's 
Commandments," as the Prayer-Book says, and 
see that in our lives we are "preachers of right- 
eousness " to the world, that is to say, that our 
lives show that we believe the words of Jesus 
Christ. 

Now this will lead us especially to three 
things. First, it will lead us to take great pains 
to keep all the rules of the Church, because 
Jesus Christ speaks to us through the Church, 
and has said that if any man " neglect to hear 
the church, let him he unto thee as a heathen man 
and a publican" (St. Matt, xviii. 17). And do 
not think that any rules of the Church are too 
small for us to keep. If we are very careful 
about keeping the small rules we shall not be at 
all likely to break great ones ; and then, my chil- 



vin.] THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH 87 

dren, remember we must keep all the rules of 
the Church, not only the pleasant ones, but the 
unpleasant ones. There are a great many peo- 
ple in our Church who keep the feasts, indeed I 
think everybody does. Every one tells you how 
lovely it is to keep Easter and Christmas as they 
come round in the Christian Year, but the 
Church equally requires us to keep the Fasts. 
There are a great many people who think it very 
wrong not to observe Sunday, but the Church re- 
quires us also to keep every Friday as a day of 
fasting and abstinence in memory of our Blessed 
Lord's Passion, and if we really love Him we 
shall wish not only to think about His Resurec- 
tion from the dead, but about that day of sorrow 
and woe when He proved His Love for us by 
dying for us. 

Secondly, it will lead us to pray with faith and 
to act on our prayers, for Christ has said that " all 
things, whatsoever ye shall ash in prayer, he- 
lieving, ye shall receive" (St. Matt. xxi. 22). 
There are many who say their prayers, who do 
not pray " believing," that is to say, do not 



88 NOAH [vin. 

pray with faith that God hears and will answer 
their prayers according to His good "Will ; and 
there are some who think that they pray with 
faith who still do not act upon their prayers — 
I mean, do not act as though they thought their 
prayers would be answered. For instance, we 
are told in the last part of the fourth chapter of 
St. John's Gospel, that there was a certain no- 
bleman whose son was sick of fever at Caper- 
naum, at the point of death, and this nobleman, 
who believed in our Lord Jesus Christ's power 
to heal his son, tore himself away from his child's 
deathbed, that he might himself go to our Lord 
and ask Him to heal his son. He said to Jesus, 
" Sir, come down ere my child die. Jesus saith 
unto him, Go thy way / thy son liveth. And 
the man believed the word that Jesus had spo- 
ken unto him, and he went his way" (St. 
John iv. 49, 50). I dare say you have often 
read these verses. I wonder whether you ever 
noticed what a wonderful example of faith they 
contain ; for when our Lord said to the man, 
"Go thy way; thy son liveth" the man was 



viii.] THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH 89 

so certain that his son was healed that instead 
of going back to his bedside in doubt and 
hope and fear, he stayed the night in Cana 
and did not start for home until the next morn- 
ing ; for we are told that when his servants met 
him, they said, " Yesterday at the seventh hour 
the fever left him? It is not quite certain in 
St. John's Gospel whether " the seventh hour " 
means one o'clock in the afternoon or seven 
o'clock in the evening, but whichever it means 
there would have been abundance of time for 
the father to have gotten home before the next 
morning. So that you see here we have an in- 
stance of one who prayed, and then, believing 
that his son was healed, acted upon that belief 
in not going home until the next day. My dear 
children, if we would only say our prayers like 
that ; if when we pray in the morning to be de- 
livered from some temptation or sin into which 
we have, perhaps, often fallen in the past, we 
would watch for the temptation to come with the 
certainty that God would give us grace to resist, 
then we should resist, we should conquer. But, 



go 



NOAH 



[viii. 



alas! we pray for help, but in the bottom of 
our heart we do not expect the help to come ; 
we expect to fall, as we have before ; and so, as 
our prayer is not the prayer of faith, it does not 
win from God the answer that God would love 
to give. 

Thirdly, it will lead us to repent of our sins ; 
for Christ has said, "Except ye repent, ye shall 
all likewise perish" (St. Luke xiii. 3). Now 
repentance requires an act of the will. It con- 
sists, as you know, of three parts : — Contrition, 
or sorrow for sin ; Confession, or acknowledg- 
ment of sin ; and Satisfaction, or giving up of 
sin ; and a repentance which stops short at being 
sorry for what we have done wrong is as useless 
as a faith which does not lead us to act upon our 
belief. 

So you see we may learn from Noah the im- 
portance of a life in which our actions really rep- 
resent our convictions; its importance to our- 
selves, since it was by building the Ark that 
Noah found a refuge and was saved ; and its im- 
portance to others, since it was by building the 



vin.] THE OBEDIENCE OF FAITH 91 

Ark that Noah witnessed to the world that he 
believed God's message of warning. It is 
strange, dear children, to look upon the world 
now and to find how many people there are who 
call themselves Christians and who therefore say 
that they believe all that Christ teaches, and yet 
who seem to think it of no consequence that in 
their lives they should entirely disregard His 
Commandments. Noah built the Ark in which 
he and his family were to be saved, but that was 
not its only use. It was to be, you know, a type 
of the Church, in which we are to be saved — a 
type of that Church which, however high the 
floods of the world may rise, always rides 
safely above them, and offers to those who enter 
her with faith a safe refuge until the storms of 
earth are over and the rest of Heaven is reached. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. God w r arned Noah of the Flood and caused 
him to warn others ; so God generally warns men 
of the results of sin. 

II. Noah believed God's words and showed 



92 NOAH [viii. 

this by at once beginning to build the Ark in 
spite of the unbelief of others ; do we believe 
and act on God's Commandments ? if not, our 
faith is worthless. 

III. The obedience of faith will lead us to 
three things : 

i. To be very careful to keep all the rules of 

the Church, 
ii. To pray with faith and to act on our prayers, 
iii. To repent of our sins. 

IV. To act on our faith will not only lead to 
cur own salvation, but will also make us by our 
actions preachers of righteousness to others. 



IX 

NOAH—II 

THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DOVE 

"He sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters 
were abated from off the face of the ground ; but the 
dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she re- 
turned unto him into the ark, for the waters were on the 
face of the whole earth : then he put forth his hand, and 
took her, and pulled her in unto him into the ark. And 
he stayed yet other seven days ; and again he sent forth 
the dove out of the ark ; and the dove came in to him 
in the evening ; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive 
leaf pluckt off : so Noah knew that the waters were 
abated from off the earth. And he stayed yet other 
seven days ; and sent forth the dove ; which returned 
not again unto him any more." — Gen. viii. 8-13. 

In reading the history of the Flood and the story 
of Noah, there is something particularly inter- 
esting in the episode of the sending forth of the 
Dove from the Ark, which after twice returning 
to Noah because it could find no rest, the third 
time found a resting-place in the restored earth. 

(93) 



94 NOAH [ix. 

There are several ways in which we may inter- 
pret this story so that it may teach us a useful 
lesson. To-day let us strive to learn from it 
something of the three temporal missions of the 
Holy Ghost, as recorded in the Bible. 

I. This lesson, dear children, may not be 
quite so easy to understand as some of the others 
we have had, but it is very important that we 
should try to learn all we can about the work of 
God's Holy Spirit, by Whom we are being sanc- 
tified. The Dove, you know, is the great type of 
the Holy Ghost; for we are expressly told in 
the Bible that at our Lord's Baptism " the Holy 
Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove 
upon him " (St. Luke iii. 22). 

i. "And the Spirit of God moved upon the 
face of the waters " (Gen. i. 2). Here, in the 
very beginning of the Bible, we have the first 
mention of the work of the Holy Spirit. When 
"the earth was without form and void; and 
darkness was upon the face of the deep" when 
all nature was in a state of wasteness and deso- 
lation, conflict and confusion everywhere, it was 



ix ] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DO VE 95 

not forsaken. The Spirit of God, Who, as our 
Creed tells us, is the Lord and Life-Giver, 
brooded over Chaos, for in the text " moved upon 
the face of the waters" the word which is trans- 
lated "moved upon" really signifies the trem- 
ulous fluttering of a bird over its nest. And 
then, "God said, Let there he light: and there 
was light n ; light to see the ruin, to see the sad 
condition to which the fair world had been re- 
duced, probably by the sin of the angels ; and 
then, as the first chapter of Genesis goes on to 
tell us, there was a gradual restoration and prep- 
aration of the world for man's abode. 

Such is the record of the first mission of the 
Holy Ghost to this world. Such was the glori- 
ous work of peace and order which was accom- 
plished through His operation in the lower 
kingdoms of nature. 

ii. "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, 
and the power of the Highest shall overshadow 
thee : therefore also that holy tiling ivhich shall 
be bom of thee shall be called the Son of God " 
(St. Luke i. 35). 



96 NOAH [ix. 

In these words, my dear children, we are told 
of the second great mission of the Holy Ghost ; 
this time not to the mere material world, but to 
one individual person chosen by God out of all 
the human race and prepared, by special gifts of 
grace and by long and earnest discipline and 
prayer, to be God's instrument in the redemp- 
tion of the world. What was the condition of 
mankind when the Angel Gabriel, at the An- 
nunciation, uttered these words? We learn 
in the fourteenth Psalm, "They are corrupt, 
and become abominable in their doings / there is 
none that doeth good, no not one" (Ps. xiv. 2). 
The moral world had become like the material 
world described in the beginning of Genesis, 
a great chaos, a great scene of struggle and con- 
flict, in which Evil seemed steadily to be gain- 
ing the victory over Good and in which the hope 
of better and brighter things was gradually be- 
coming obscured by the dark night of human sin. 
And yet, hopeless as mankind seemed, it was 
not abandoned. That Holy Spirit Which moved 
upon the waters of the primeval Chaos, brooded 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DO VE 97 

over the mass of humanity when out of it God 
took one, the Lily among the thorns, Mary, the 
Ever-Blessed Virgin, and the Holy Ghost over- 
shadowed her, and "God said, Let there he 
light" and His own dear Son stepped down 
into creation — He Who said of Himself that Pie 
was the Light of the world ; and the Light 
Which thus came into the world not only re- 
vealed the darkness and confusion of sin, but 
began the work of Redemption. 

The second time the dove came back to the 
Ark it w T as with the olive leaf in her mouth, 
which told Noah that the waters were beginning 
to abate, that God's promise was being fulfilled. 
The second time that the Holy Ghost came 
forth in His mission to the world, it was to bring 
to man the olive branch which told of that peace 
between God and man which was made through 
Christ, Who is indeed the Prince of Peace. 

iii. "And when the day of Pentecost was 
fully come, they were all with one accord in 
one place. And suddenly there came a sound 
from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and 



98 NOAH [ix. 

it filled all the house where they were sitting. 
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues 
like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. 
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost " 
(Acts ii. 1-4). 

The third time the dove did not return to the 
Ark and to Noah, because she had found in the 
renewed earth that on which she could rest. 
And so when the Holy Ghost went forth on the 
third mission and came down upon the Apostles 
at Pentecost, He found them assembled, wait- 
ing, prepared to be the temple of the Spirit of 
God, and so rested upon them and filled them. 
"The Spirit of the Lord filleth the world" 
(Wisdom i. 7). At Pentecost the Holy Ghost 
came down to this world, never again to leave 
it. He finds His resting-place in the soul of 
man, because Jesus had prepared man for the 
reception of the Holy Ghost, had built up, as it 
were, the frame-work of the Church, and the 
Holy Ghost was to dwell in it, giving it life, 
and now indeed permanently light was to shine 
in the darkness and the work of Sanctification 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DOVE 99 

was to begin, — to begin and to continue until 
the number of the Saints is made up. You 
know, dear children, you say in your Catechism 
that you learn in the Creed to believe in God 
the Father, who hath made you and all the 
world, in God the Son, who hath redeemed you 
and all mankind, but you say that you believe 
in God the Holy Ghost, who sanctifieth you 
and all the elect people of God ; because, while 
the work of your creation was accomplished 
once for all, and the work of your redemption 
was linished by our Blessed Lord by the one of- 
fering of Himself, the work of your sanctifica- 
tion is ever going on through all the various 
channels by which the Holy Spirit of God 
brings grace to your soul. Jesus came to renew 
mankind, to make it the dwelling-place of His 
Holy Spirit forever. 

II. But, my dear children, what the Holy 
Spirit has done for the world at large, that He 
does for each individual soul. You know, the 
human soul has been called a Microcosm. This 
is a Greek word, which means " a little world," 



ioo NOAH [ix 

because our soul is like a miniature of the great 
world in which we live. And so we shall see, 
I hope, to-day, how the history of the dealings 
of the Holy Spirit of God with the world of 
which we are a part, is also a history of His 
dealings with us in our own individual and per- 
sonal life. 

i. The Chaos which is described in the second 
verse of the Book of Genesis is a picture of 
many a sinner's soul, a conflict of passions, a 
struggle of good and evil, the reign of darkness. 
Yet that Soul is not forgotten by God ; how- 
ever far we may have strayed away from Him, 
however long we may have forgotten Him, 
however deeply and wilfully we may have sinned 
against Him, the dear Spirit of God broods over 
us, and at the right moment the word is spoken, 
"Let there he light" and the first gift to the sin- 
ner is light to see his state, to realize his sin ; for 
you know our Lord Jesus Christ told us that 
when the Holy Ghost was come into the world 
He should "convince the world of sin" (St. 
John xvi. 8), and He is the dear Spirit of peni- 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DOVE 101 

tence, for it is His office to make us know, to 
make us feel, to make us repent of our sins,/ 
And this first gift of light, which is bestowed 
upon us by the operation of the Holy Spirit, 
gives us power to see two things : first, our sins, 
what we are, what we have made ourselves ; and 
then the glorious possibilities of our life, what 
we might be, what God meant us to be when 
He created us. This must ever be the first step 
from sin toward God, not only to know our sins, 
for that knowledge alone might overwhelm us 
with despair, but to know the powers of holi- 
ness still hidden away in our nature^ like the 
treasure which the man found in the field as he 
was plowing, and you know the Bible tells us 
that he went and sold all that he had and bought 
that field (St. Matt. xiii. 44) ; so that when we 
have this light given to us to see what we may 
become, we ought to be ready and willing to 
give up all things, that we may possess the treas- 
ure which was hidden in our nature when we 
were baptized. 

ii. The action of the Holy Ghost in over- 



102 NOAH [ix. 

shadowing the Blessed Virgin Mary at the An- 
nunciation, which caused our Blessed Lord to be 
born of her, typifies the work of the same Bless- 
ed Spirit upon each of us in Baptism, when w T e 
are made the children of God, when the germ 
of a Christ-like nature is imparted to us, when 
Christ is, as it were, born in us. The w T ords are 
spoken by God, "Zet there he light" not that 
external light before Baptism, the light of pre- 
venient grace, which leads the sinner to that 
Sacrament, but that indwelling light of the abid- 
ing Presence of the Holy Ghost, which, if we 
are obedient to His inspirations, burns brighter 
and brighter, guiding us through the darkness 
of the world and making us often a light to 
other souls. Before our Baptism we were " chil- 
dren of wrath," as the Catechism says ; by it we 
became the children of God, and so at peace 
with Him, through Christ, Who is our Peace, 
and here we see the olive branch, w 7 hich the 
dove brought back the second time, symbolizing 
the Baptismal gift of Christ, the Prince of 
Peace. 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OE THE DOVE 103 

iii. The gift of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, 
when Refilled the Apostles, points to His seven- 
fold gift to us in Confirmation, when in that 
Sacrament we receive all His fulness and are 
equipped with the graces that we need for our 
battle in life, when we are strengthened for the 
work which God calls us to do, and Christian 
manhood begins; from henceforth our priv- 
ilege and responsibility is to use these graces, 
remembering that we have all the fulness of the 
Holy Spirit, Who is Himself Almighty, and so 
realizing that we can conquer all our foes, that 
we can accomplish all that God gives us to do, 
if only our will co-operates with the grace which 
the Holy Spirit freely and continually offers us. 

Perhaps, my dear children, I can help you to 
remember this sermon on the missions of the 
Holy Spirit to your soul, and I know it has 
been rather a difficult sermon for you to re- 
member, by telling you a little story which 
I heard a great many years ago. It was about 
a clergyman in England, who used to spend 
his summer holidays with a friend in the 



io 4 NOAH [ix. 

mountains of Wales. This friend had a daugh- 
ter, a young girl, full of life and brightness, a 
favorite with every one and a great worker in 
her parish, — in the Sunday-school and among 
the poor. The priest and this young girl be- 
came great friends, but one thing w 7 hich troubled 
him was that while she was industrious and 
good, and, so far as externals were concerned, 
was fairly religious, still she seemed to have no 
love for God, no consciousness of her own sin- 
fulness. She was light-hearted and generous 
and kind, and did not seem ever to have a 
thought of the deeper things of the soul and of 
God. So when his holiday came to an end, 
as he was wishing her good-bye, he said, " I 
am going to ask you to promise to do some- 
thing for me," and when she asked what it was 
he replied, "To promise that every day until 
I come again next year, you will say a very 
short prayer that I am going to teach you. Will 
you % " And she, in a good-natured way, said, 
"Oh, yes, certainly." He said, "The prayer is 
this : 'Lord, show me myself.' " 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DOVE 105 

When he came back a year later to spend an- 
other month with his friend in the mountains, 
he found her quite an altered girl. The bright- 
ness was gone ; she seemed very, very sad ; and 
when he had an opportunity of talking to her 
alone, she said, " Oh, I said that prayer, and 
God has answered it and shown me myself, all 
my sins, my forgetful n ess of God, my self-love, 
and I am very unhappy." The priest said, 
" Well, now we will change the prayer ; say in- 
stead, 'Lord, show me Thyself.' " 

When he came back the following year for 
his holiday, he found his young friend as bright 
and happy as ever before, only with a better hap- 
piness, with a truer joy, one that rested upon the 
love of God, one that came from a knowledge 
of what Christ had done for her soul. So he 
said to her, "]STow, I am going to give you a 
third prayer instead of the other, one to be said 
to the end of your life, and that is, 'Lord, make 
me like Thyself? " 

It is quite twenty years, dear children, since T 
heard that story, but how truly it illustrates the 



106 NOAH [ix. 

teaching of the Bible about the three missions of 
the Holy Ghost to our souls, the three works 
that He has to do in our lives ! First to show 
us ourselves, what we are, our sins; then to 
show us our Lord, what He is, our Saviour, how 
He takes away our sins and imparts to us His 
own Righteousness ; and then in the daily work 
of Sanctification, how He the Holy Spirit helps 
us to become more and more like our Lord, for 
the Imitation of Christ must ever be the end of 
all Christian life, and can only be accomplished 
through the help of the Holy Ghost. Suppos- 
ing, dear children, we say those prayers, that we 
ask the Holy Spirit to show us ourselves, that we 
may not deceive ourselves about our sins; to 
show us our Lord, so that seeing His beauty and 
goodness we may love Him with all our hearts, 
and then that He may help us in our daily lives, 
in our little toils and conflicts, to overcome our 
sins, to become more and more like Him Who, 
before He died for us, said, u It is expedient for 
you that I go away : for if I go not away, the 
Comforter will not come unto you ; hut if Ide- 



ix.] THE THREE MISSIONS OF THE DO VE 107 

part, I will send Mm unto you v (St. John xvi. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. The Dove is a type of the Holy Spirit. 

i. Brooding over Chaos and introducing the 

work of Restoration, 
ii. Overshadowing the Blessed Yirgin and so 

accomplishing the Incarnation. 
iii. Filling the Church at Pentecost and begin- 
ning the work of Sanctification. 

II. This is a picture of the work of the Holy 
Spirit with each soul. 

i. By prevenient grace leading it to Conver- 
sion and the Sacraments, 
ii. By Baptism imparting to it the gift of 

Christ Himself. 
iii. Through all the other channels of grace 
continuing the work of Sanctification. 

III. The story of the three prayers, 
i. Lord, show me myself. 

ii. Lord, show me Thyself. 
iii. Lord, make me like Thyself. 



ABRAHAM 

PEBSEVEBANGE 

" And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan ; 
and into the land of Canaan they came. " — Gen. xii. 5. 

I dare say, my dear children, that you rather 

wonder why I have chosen this text out of all 

the many chapters in the Book of Genesis which 

refer to the life of Abraham. Perhaps you 

think it is very commonplace. Perhaps you are 

saying to yourselves, "If he went to go to a 

place, it is quite natural that he should get 

there." Why should the Bible go out of its 

way, so to speak, to tell us such an ordinary 

thing ? And yet I hope you will see before I 

have finished my sermon, that this is not only a 

very important text, but that it teaches us a very 

helpful lesson ; for it teaches, dear children, that 
(108) 



x.] PERSEVERANCE 109 

most useful of all lessons, Perseverance, without 
which all the good things that we do in our lives, 
all the battles we win, all the ills we suffer, all 
the crosses we bear, are of no avail. 

Our Lord says, " He that shall endure unto 
the end, the same shall he saved" (St. Mark xiii. 
13), and, "J3e thou faithful unto death, and I 
will give thee a crown of life" (Rev. ii. 10). 
We read in the Gospels of one who was so great 
and so good that he became an apostle, who gave 
up all things to follow our Lord Jesus Christ and 
who listened to His teaching for three years, and 
yet did not persevere to the end, and so was 
lost. I mean, of course, Judas Iscariot. 

But let us consider the lesson which the 
text teaches us, — the lesson of Perseverance. 
How many things we begin, how few we finish ! 
How much we plan, how little we accomplish ! 
And why? Want of perseverance is the cause. 
What a wonderful life, what a useful life ours 
would be if we always persevered in our efforts 
to the very end, till we had accomplished what 
we were trying to do ! But we do not. We are 



no ABRAHAM [x. 

so easily discouraged, and when difficulties arise 
which we had not anticipated or other work 
claims our attention, we just give up what we 
meant to do and turn to something else. This 
habit grows upon us, unless we are very careful, 
and at last makes our character weak and vacil- 
lating. How many there are with great abilities 
and great opportunities in their life, who might 
have become very great men, who failed just be- 
cause they had no perseverance ! Abraham was 
a very great man. He had many, very many 
gifts and virtues, but none more marked than 
the gift of tremendous, indomitable persever- 
ance. What he undertook to do he did, and 
although, as we read his history we find that on 
two occasions he had to turn aside from his pur- 
pose of sojourning in Canaan, yet each time he 
came back to it, and he stayed there until he died. 
There is another thing men want to enable 
them to make a success in life, and that is a defi- 
nite object or goal. Abraham had as the goal 
of his journey the land of Canaan, which God 
had promised to give to him and to his seed. 



X.] PERSEVERANCE in 

Then the third step is reached when we recog- 
nize this object as one given us by God, revealed 
to us by His Voice, that is to say, when it be- 
comes our vocation. Let me tell you, dear chil- 
dren, what we mean by a " vocation " in life. 
We mean this, that God has something definite 
for each one of us to do in this world, and that 
at some time or other in our life, God shows us 
what this work is ; that He speaks to us and calls 
us to a certain path in life. And then, my chil- 
dren, when we have heard God's Voice, we can 
be quite sure about our path in life, and can per- 
severe without being daunted by any difficulties, 
without having any doubts. 

So it was with Abraham. In his life we see 
not only the foundation virtue of perseverance, 
but the realization of an object and the recog- 
nition of a distinct call from God, all pointing 
in the same direction — that he was to leave his 
fatherland and as a stranger and pilgrim to wan- 
der forth until he came to the land of Canaan. 
We do not know how many difficulties Abraham 
had to meet, how many perils he had to pass 



ABRAHAM 



[x. 



through, how many obstacles he had to overcome 
before he reached the goal of his labors. They 
are all passed over in the few w T ords of the text, 
"They went forth to go into the land of Ca- 
naan ; and into the land of Canaan they came. " 

As I have said, when to perseverance and to a 
realization of the goal of our life there is added 
a distinct call of God, everything is present to 
make our life truly a noble one. But even 
where this last is wanting, the power of perse- 
verance and the having an object in life has led 
men who otherwise would probably have been 
quite unknown in the world to become very 
great. 

But in addition to this one great vocation 
which God gives us and on which our eternity 
depends, there are many lesser vocations from 
time to time leading up to and preparing us for 
the great call of God. For children the first 
Promised Land is Knowledge, — a wonderful 
country ; and just as the spies brought back from 
Eshcol that marvellous bunch of grapes which, car- 
ried upon a pole between two of them, reached to 



x.] PERSEVERANCE 113 

the ground ; so children see in those older than 
themselves some of the wonderful fruits which 
may be gathered in the Promised Land of 
Knowledge. But it is a difficult country to 
reach. You all know, do you not, dear chil- 
dren, how hard it is continually to study, not 
only to study those things which are pleasant and 
easy, but those lessons which are hard and seem 
uninteresting, and yet which you are told are so 
important ? But you must persevere, you must 
work away, you must let it be said of you, of 
each thing you begin to learn, " They went forth 
to go into the land of Canaan ; and into the 
land of Canaan they came" 

Then, secondly, there is self-conquest. The 
next land which you have to obtain possession of 
is the land of your own soul, of your own nature. 
You know how the Israelites found Canaan in 
the possession of seven strong nations, whom it 
took them years and years to conquer, and who, 
after they had partially conquered them, rose in 
rebellion and threw off their yoke and brought 
them into captivity. Indeed there is one book 



H4 ABRAHAM [x. 

of the Bible— the Book of Judges— which is 
one long story of the captivity of the Israelites 
to one after another of these strong foes in the 
land of Canaan. And so yon have to conquer 
many faults in order that you may gain posses- 
sion of the land of your own nature. First 
there are the sins which you have inherited. 
Then there are the wicked or weak tendencies 
of the temperament, or peculiar moral consti- 
tution with which God has endowed you, and 
then there are the Seven Nations of Canaan, 
the seven deadly sins — Anger, Pride, Gluttony, 
Lust, Avarice, Envy, and Sloth, each with its 
stronghold in your heart ; and Jericho, the beset- 
ting sin which has to be conquered first, and 
which is the hardest to overcome. In this 
conflict the great thing you need is perseverance, 
never to give up until the last foe in you is over- 
thrown, until you have won the Promised Land, 
until you have enthroned as its King our Lord 
Jesus Christ, that He may rule and guide all 
your life. 

Then lastly, there is your life work, the special 



x.] PERSEVERANCE 115 

work to which you are called. Choose it with 
prayer and careful consideration ; listen for 
God's Voice to guide you in your choice, and 
when you have heard that Voice, do not change. 
Persevere, and whatever your hand findeth to 
do, do it with all your might. Persevere until 
life's work is done, life's reward is won. 

But all these lesser vocations lead to one su- 
preme goal, Heaven itself. All else is insignif- 
icant in comparison with this. All those other 
countries which have to be conquered, the realm 
of Intellect, the realm of Morals, the realm of 
the World, all lead up to the supreme reward in 
the possession of the Promised Land of Heaven. 
About this vocation there can be no doubt that 
God has called you. About this road there can 
be no question that our Lord has said to you, 
" Follow Me " ; for this road leads to that Throne 
in Heaven of which He says, "To him that 
overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my 
throne, even as I also over came, and am set 
down with my Father in his throne" (Rev. 
hi. 21). But that we may reach this glorious 



n6 ABRAHAM [x. 

end we need the greatest of all gifts — the 
gift of final perseverance, and that we may 
obtain it, let me give you, dear children, 
two simple rules. First, pray for it, for it 
is one of the gifts that we cannot merit, 
but which God loves to give us in answer to 
prayer ; and second, never give up any spiritual 
exercise which you have once begun. Never, 
because you are tired of it or because it seems to 
have ceased to help you, give up your Bible read- 
ing, or your prayers, or your confessions, or your 
communions, or anything you have ever begun 
for the glory of God and the good of your soul, 
and you will persevere and gain posssesion of your 
Canaan, Heaven itself. 

ANALYSTS. 

In this text we learn the great lesson of Perse- 
verance. One of Abraham's greatest gifts, one 
without which all others are useless. 

I. We may observe three things in the text : 
i. Perseverance, 
ii. An object in life. 



x] PERSE VERANCE 117 

iii. God's call. 

II. Lesser vocations lead up to the one great 
vocation. For children there are three lands of 
Canaan to be reached. 

i. Knowledge, 
ii. Self-conquest. 
iii. The work of life. 

III. All these help to bring us to the great 
goal, the promised land, Heaven itself; — in 
order to reach it, that we may persevere : 

i. Pray continually for final perseverance, 
ii. Never give up any spiritual exercise that 
you have begun. 



XI 

LOT 

THE DANGEES OF W0BLDLINE88 

"And delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conver- 
sation of the wicked : (for that righteous man dwelling 
among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous 
soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds.)" — 2 St. 
Peter ii. 7-8. 

If we had not these inspired words of St. 

Peter to help us, I think, dear children, that we 

should perhaps have made a mistake in forming 

our opinion of Lot. If we had only the Old 

Testament story, w T e might have thought him a 

wicked man, like those among whom he dwelt, 

but these words tell us (and they come to us with 

all the force of inspiration) that Lot, even with 

all the sin that he saw around him in Sodom, 

was still a just and a righteous man, and vexed 

his righteous soul from day to day at the 
(us) 



xi.] THE DANGERS OF W0RLDL1NESS 119 

wickedness of the men of Sodom. And while 
what St. Peter says would, of course, have been 
sufficient for us, we may also remember that 
God sent two angels to deliver Lot from the 
wicked city of Sodom before He destroyed it, 
and God does not send angels to take care of 
wicked people, so that there can be no doubt 
that Lot was a good man. 

But though he was good, he had one great be- 
setting sin — Covetousness, an inordinate love of 
riches. We are told (Gen. xiii. 6) that he and 
his uncle Abraham were very rich and had so 
many flocks and herds that they were obliged to 
separate in order to find pasture for all their cat- 
tle. Abraham generously gave Lot his choice, 
and said : "Is not the whole land before thee ? 
separate thyself, I pray thee, from me : if 
thou wilt take the left hand, then I will go to the 
right ; or if thou depart to the right hand, then 
I will go to the left " (Gen. xiii. 9). Now Lot 
should have remembered that he was the 
younger, and so should have deferred to Abra- 
ham and asked him to choose first, but he seems 



120 



LOT 



[XI. 



to have thought only of himself and his own in- 
terest, and chose what seemed to him the very 
best place — " all the plain of the Jordan" for it 
was well watered everywhere ; and he "pitched 
his tent toward Sodom. But the men of Sodom 
were wicked and sinners before the Lord ex- 
ceedingly" (Gen. xiii. 12, 13). 

Now, my dear children, let us carefully con- 
sider what his choice involved. Lot was rich, 
he had plenty, but in order to become much 
richer he ran a very great risk, for he went and 
lived among very wicked people, where he 
was all the time surrounded by the most dread- 
ful sin. He did not join in the sins of these 
people ; no, we are told that he hated these sins 
and vexed his soul from day to day about them, 
but — he went on living there. There are a great 
many people in the world in the present day 
who are very much like Lot — people who are 
good themselves and who wish to continue good, 
but who for love of money and in order to get 
on in the world are willing to run dreadful risks 
by working in very bad places and among very 



xi.] THE DANGERS OF WORLDLINESS 121 

wicked people and at very dangerous employ- 
ments, and the result is that, though they mean 
to continue good, they very often become bad 
themselves. The sin they see around them at first 
vexes them, as we are told it vexed Lot, but 
gradually they get used to it and then after a 
while come even to like it and to do the same 
things themselves as they see other people do. 
Now this great temptation, my dear children, 
often comes to young people when they first go 
out to work in the world. They find, perhaps, 
that they can earn a little more in a bad place 
than in a good place, that they can get paid a lit- 
tle higher wages to work in a place where the 
money is made dishonestly, where it is made by 
misrepresenting the value of the goods sold — 
and they have to take part in this dishonesty, to 
lie about the things they sell, to say that they 
are better than they really are — so they see com- 
mitted daily the two sins of lying and cheating, 
and they perhaps come at last to join in these 
things rather than go to a place where they could 
not get so much money, but where their souls 



122 LOT [xi. 

would be protected from this sort of sin. Or, 
worse still, sometimes they work where it is al- 
most impossible to retain their self-respect and 
purity. Perhaps it is good pay there, but re- 
member the question our Lord asks : " What is a 
man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, 
and lose his own soul ? " (St. Matthew xvi. 26). 
God is very good to us in sending us many 
warnings when we are going in the wrong path, 
if we will only listen to His Yoice, only learn 
by His visitations. You remember how, when 
our Lord Jesus Christ entered Jerusalem on 
Palm Sunday, as He turned the angle in the 
road across the Mount of Olives and first caught 
sight of the city across the valley of the Ke- 
dron, He wept over it. Why ? Because its peo- 
ple " knew not the time of their visitation." He 
was going to enter that city and to preach in it 
and to warn it of its impending doom, but He 
saw that the people would not listen, for they 
could not realize that this was indeed " the time 
of their visitation." And so God, in His great 
mercy, sent Lot a warning. We read in the four- 



xi.] THE DANGERS OF WORLDLINESS 123 

teenth chapter of Genesis that Chedorlaomer, 
King of Elam, with three other Kings made war 
on the King of Sodom and his neighbors and 
overthrew them, and took Lot captive and all his 
goods and carried them away. What must have 
been Lot's reflections ! All that he had, lost ! 
and he himself a slave! Oh, if he had stayed 
with Abraham ! But by God's mercy and 
Abraham's courage, he was rescued. No sooner 
did Abraham hear of this than he armed his own 
trained servants, and with his friends Aner, 
Eshcol and Mamre, pursued after the kings, 
conquered them and brought back Lot and all 
his possessions. 

Now surely, this, was a warning to Lot of the 
danger of living in Sodom, and one would think 
that after Abraham's generous behavior Lot 
would not wish again to leave him. But what 
did he do ? He did not seem to see the warn- 
ing, and so he went back to Sodom and lived 
there amid all its sin until the time when God 
destroyed it. How often this is so with covet- 
ous people ! Some great calamity happens, ruin 



124 LOT [xi. 

threatens them, and they think that if they only 
may be delivered from this one great difficulty, 
they will do so differently, they will run no more 
risks, they will venture on no more speculations. 
JBut, alas! too often, when God in His mercy 
helps them, they forget the time of difficulty 
and the resolutions they made then, and they go 
back to the same danger. 

Then comes the end. God determines to de- 
stroy Sodom, but in His great love sends two 
angels to save Lot. The morning of the terrible 
day dawns, and the angels hurry Lot and his wife 
and his two daughters out of the city. Lot's 
wife looks back to the burning city, with regret 
at leaving it, and is turned into a pillar of salt. 
He intercedes for the little city of Zoar and 
pleads that that may be spared as a place of ref- 
uge for him. But at last he has learned the 
lesson and feels that he is not secure, even in 
Zoar, and so he makes his way to the mountains 
and dwells there in a cave, with his two daugh- 
ters, — the rich chieftain, who in his desire to be- 
come richer has lost everything, flocks and herds, 



xi.] THE DANGERS OF WORLDLINESS 125 

servants and money, wife and sons, all destroyed, 
his only home a cave in the mountains, his life 
only saved ! He had his warning when he was 
delivered from the Elamites, but he did not take 
it, and now this is the end ! 

My children, let us learn from the story of 
Lot the danger of living among bad people, of 
making them our friends and companions. Bet- 
ter to be poor and holy than to be rich at the risk 
of your souls ; better to have no friends than to 
have for your friends those who are not the 
friends of God. 

ANALYSIS. 

The Second Epistle of St. Peter throws 
the light of Inspiration on the character of 
Lot. 

i. A righteous man, but with a strong beset- 
ting sin, Covetousness. 
ii. It leads him to a selfish choice, and one 

which exposes him to great danger, 
iii. God sends him a warning, but he goes back 
to Sodom. 



126 LOT [xi. 

iv. Finally in the destruction of Sodom two 
angels are sent to save Lot's life, but he 
loses all his possessions. 
A warning against working at sinful occupa- 
tions or among wicked people for the sake of 
making more money. 



XII 

HAQAB 

THE PEE SEN GE OF GOD 

" Thou God seest me." — Gen. xvi. 13. 

"Thou God seest me" I think, my dear chil- 
dren, that there are probably very few texts in 
the Old Testament which are so familiar as this, 
very few words of the Bible which every one 
knows as well as they know these words ; yet I 
venture to think that there are very few who 
could tell me who it was that said them. Was 
it some great saint, like Abraham, the Friend 
of God, who proved his devotion to God by his 
obedience, first in leaving his country at God's 
call, then in offering up his son Isaac at God's 
command ? Or was it Jacob, the Prince of God, 
who wrestled all night with the angel at Jabbok, 

and saw God face to face at Peniel ? Or was it 

(127) 



128 



HAGAR 



[xn. 



Mos3s, the leader of God's chosen people, the 
hero of the wanderings in the wilderness ? Or 
was it David, the man after God's own heart, 
who wrote those beautiful Psalms which we say 
or sing so often in the services of the Church ? 
But no, for then it would have been of little 
help to us, for then we might have thought, 
u Yes, God sees and cares for great saints like 
Abraham and Jacob and Moses and David, be- 
cause they were so great and good and holy, be- 
cause they did so much to show their love for 
God ; but for me — insignificant, sinful, disobe- 
dient me — does God really care for me ? is His 
Eye always watching over me ? " And what is 
the answer ? Who spoke these words ? Not a 
great saint, not a great hero, but a poor Egyp- 
tian slave-girl, Hagar. Her mistress was jealous 
of her and had treated her very harshly. Her 
life had become unendurable, as many a slave's 
life, I suppose, has before, and so she ran away 
from her mistress, ran away from home, ran off 
into the wilderness — perhaps to die, for what 
could a poor girl do alone in a great desert ? 



xil] THE PRESENCE OF GOD 129 

When people crossed that desert they went in 
caravans, carrying on their camels provisions 
and skins filled with water, that they might not 
die of hunger and thirst; but she had nothing. 
She ran away, and coming to a well of water, 
she sat down there in her misery, and an angel 
from God came to her — came to her and told her 
to return and submit herself to her mistress, and 
promised her as a reward that she should have a 
son who should be the founder of a great nation ; 
told her, that is, to go back and do her duty in 
the state of life unto which God's Providence 
had called her ; told her to take up her cross, to 
bear her trials, and that her reward should be 
that she, a poor slave, should be the mother of 
a mighty nation. That promise, dear children, 
was made nearly four thousand years ago, and 
to-day wherever we find the Arabs wandering 
through those deserts of Egypt and Syria and 
Arabia we see its fulfilment, for Hagar's son 
Ishmael, you know, was the founder of the Ara- 
bian nation. 

What a great lesson Hagar teaches us ! The 



130 HA GAR [xn. 

lesson of God's watchful Providence; of His 
tireless Eye upon us, of His tender care for us, 
when even the sorrows of a poor slave-girl do 
not escape His notice — when one of those bright 
Spirits who wait around His Throne is sent to 
comfort and strengthen Hagar, to tell her what 
to do, and to promise her so great a reward. 
Surely, then, these words must be full of com- 
fort and help to us, for however poor or humble 
or sinful we may be, we can hardly be worse off 
than poor Hagar was ; and God saw her sor- 
rows, and therefore sees ours, and is ready, if 
only we ask Him in prayer, to help us. 

Now, there are four times in your life, my 
children, when I think it would be a special 
help to you to say these words of Hagar, 
"Thou God seest meP First, when you are ex- 
posed to great temptations, when you feel the 
Evil One near you, trying to lead you to do 
what is wrong ; when perhaps your very com- 
panions are endeavoring to lead you astray, are 
suggesting to you some sinful act, are trying to 
draw you into some wrong conversation or en- 



xii.] THE PRESENCE OF GOD 131 

deavoring to persuade you to tell a lie to save 
you or them from blame — then think of God's 
Presence ; then say those words of Hagar 
"Thou God seest me" or those words of Joseph, 
"How can I do this great iviclcedness, and sin 
against God?" (Gen. xxxix. 9). Think of 
God's Eye upon you, watching to see what you 
will do, to see whether you will remember Him 
— ready to send, if need be, angel guardians to 
help you and strengthen you. Yes, in time of 
temptation, when sin is all around, there is no 
text, I think, my children, better for you to say 
than the words "Thou God seest me P 

Secondly, it is not only in time of temptation 
that you can say these words most helpfully, 
but also in any time of trouble or sorrow or 
struggle. Hagar, when she said them, was in 
great sorrow, fleeing from the burden of a very 
heavy cross ; and at some time or other of your 
lives you must expect to feel sorrow. Ah, even 
while you are still children sorrow will perhaps 
touch your hearts ; for Sorrow is the King in 
this world, and sooner or later every one feels 



132 HA GAR [xn. 

his sceptre. How soon the childish face is 
bathed in tears ! how soon upon the memory is 
plowed the recollection of sorrow ! But in our 
sorrows, what can be so great a comfort, so great 
a help, as to think that God sees us ! God, our 
Heavenly Father, Who loves us, Who has taught 
us by His Apostle Saint Peter that we may cast 
all our cares upon Him, for He cares for us. 
When you are in great sorrow, dear children, 
say these words, "Thou God seest me; Thou 
knowest my sorrow, Thou knowest how hard it 
is for me to bear it, Thou hast sent it to me in 
love as a Cross and with it Thou wilt send me 
grace to bear it. O Lord, I do not say, Take it 
away, but, Thy Will be done in earth, as it is 
in Heaven." 

Thirdly, this text is a great help in time of 
Prayer. Most of you know how hard it is to 
pray ; how, with the very best intentions, our 
thoughts will wander, and the world, with our 
work- and play, our sorrows and joys, will come 
crowding into our mind and calling our atten- 
tion away from God. The great help, the great 



xii.] THE PRESENCE OF GOD 133 

remedy in such a case must be the realization of 
God's Presence, the saying, and more — the feel- 
ing, "Thou God seest me" It would be a good 
thing, dear children, always to begin your 
prayers with these words — before you kneel 
down and begin to speak to God, to put yourself 
in His Presence — to say, "Thou God seest me" 
And then again, when perhaps in the midst of 
your prayers you find your thoughts have gone 
astray, to bring them back by repeating this 
text. And it is good to do this not only in your 
private prayers, but also in your prayers in 
Church. 

Lastly, we all have to make difficult decisions 
in our life, to make up our minds about small 
things almost every day, and sometimes about 
very great things, on which our whole future 
life may very much depend. Then again is 
the time to say this text, "Thou God seest me" 
for we find in the thirty-second Psalm and the 
ninth verse God's promise, "I will inform thee, 
and teach thee in the way wherein thou shalt go : 
and I will guide thee with mine eye" A de- 



134 



HA GAR 



[xn. 



cision made in God's Presence is sure to be a 
right decision, for when we feel the conscious- 
ness of that Eye, it guides us in the way that 
God would have us to go. 

You must not think it hard, my dear chil- 
dren, to have to remember God's Presence, for 
it ought to be the great joy of your life here, 
as it will be the great joy of your life hereafter ; 
for you know that Heaven is simply life in 
God's Presence, and the best preparation we 
can make for Heaven w 7 ill be to cultivate the 
recollection of that Presence now. Indeed, this 
gives us a foretaste of the very ;oys of Heaven. 
"Thou God seest me" Let this be our motto 
on earth, in temptation, in trial, in prayer, in 
difficulty, in sorrow and in joy, and it will be 
our happiness, our glory in Heaven, not only 
that God will then see us, as He does now, but 
that we shall see Him, and that waking up after 
His Likeness, we shall be satisfied with it. 



XII]. THE PRESENCE OF GOD 13s 

ANALYSIS. 

These were not the words of a great saint, but 
of a poor Egyptian si aye girl, Hagar, at a time 
when she was in great distress. They teach us 
the great lesson of God's care for us. 

There are four times when these words should 
be specially helpful to us : 

i. In temptation to sin. 

ii. In trial and sorrow, 
iii. In time of Prayer, 
iy. In time of difficulty. 

To cultivate a sense of God's Presence here 
is the best preparation for our life in Heaven 
hereafter. 



XIII 

MELGHIZEDEK 
THE GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 

"And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth 
bread and wine : and he was the priest of the most high 
God. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram 
of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth : 
and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered 
thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him tithes of 
all."— Gen. xiv. 18-20. 

One of the most mysterious persons in Old 
Testament History is the Priest King Melchize- 
dek. He suddenly appears as Abraham is re- 
turning from his victorious expedition against 
Chedorlaomer and his confederates, and blesses 
Abraham, giving him bread and wine and receiv- 
ing from him a tithe of all the spoil that Abra- 
ham had taken. We are told a good deal about 
Melchizedek in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and 

what we are told there seems to shroud him in 

(136) 



xiii.] GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 137 

an atmosphere of even greater mystery, for we 
are told that the meaning of his name is " King 
of Righteousness," and that his title, King of 
Salem, means "King of Peace," that he was 
without father, without mother, and without de- 
scent, and that he was a Type of the Son of God, 
our Lord Jesus Christ, who " dbideih a priest 
continually " (Heb. vii. 2, 3). 

Now Melchizedek seemed to some people so 
mysterious that they thought he was not a 
real man. They thought it very improbable that 
Jerusalem should have been called Salem as far 
back as the time of Melchizedek, and still 
more improbable that it should have been 
ruled over by one who was at the same time its 
King and its Priest. And so people who have 
more faith in their own cleverness than in the 
truth of God's Word thought that the story of 
Melchizedek was imaginary, a sort of fable or 
parable, and not to be taken as a real event. 

But the most wonderfully interesting and im- 
portant discovery that has ever been made in 
Biblical archaeology took place in the year 1887, 



138 



MELCHIZEDEK 



[xiii. 



just seven years ago, when some explorers began 
to dig into a mound on the east side of the River 
Nile, between Thebes and Cairo, at a place called 
Tel-el- Amarna, and unearthed the capital of the 
last two kings of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dy- 
nasty. Their names were Amenophis III. and 
IV. After digging away at the city for some 
time they came across the place in which 
were kept the records of the kingdom. These 
were not written on parchment, as we write them 
in our days. If they had been, they would long 
since have turned to dust and been lost, but 
in those days they wrote upon clay tablets, in a 
sort of hand writing which we call " Cuneiform," 
from the Latin word for a wedge, because the 
letters are made up of a number of wedge- 
shaped or arrow-headed signs. I do not think, 
dear children, that I should advise you all to go 
to work and learn that language, because, though 
it is very interesting, I think you would find it 
rather difficult. Some of you may remember 
how long it took you to learn your own alpha- 
bet of twenty-six letters, but the Cuneiform al- 



xiii.] GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 139 

phabet is made up of nearly five hundred differ- 
ent characters, each of which has at least two 
different phonetic values, that is, two different 
sounds, and besides this, each character may be 
used, as we call it, " ideographically," that is, to 
denote an object or an idea, so that you see peo- 
ple who learned the Babylonian Cuneiform 
method of writing had to work a good deal 
harder than we do to learn to read our own 
language. 

Well, among the clay tablets were found a great 
number of reports from the different governors 
or vassal kings of the surrounding countries, 
which were subject to Egypt, the most interest- 
ing to us being some letters from Ebed-Tob, 
Priest and King of Jerusalem. He tells us that 
he was unlike any other Egyptian governor in 
Canaan in that he had been appointed or con- 
firmed in his post, not by Pharaoh, but by the 
Oracle and Power of the Great King, the God, 
that is to say, whose Sanctuary stood on the sum- 
mit of Moriah. He tells us that it was not from 
his father or his mother that he inherited his dig- 



i 4 o MELCHIZEDEK [xm. 

nity, but that he was King of Jerusalem because 
he was the Priest of its God. 

These letters have been buried almost from 
the time they were written, that is, about 3,500 
years ago, and now that they have been dug up 
they explain to us what is said about Melchize- 
dek, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, about his be- 
ing without father and without mother, about 
his being at once Priest and King. They show 
us that up to that time, if not later, Jerusalem 
was governed by a royal Priest whose title and 
office was like Melchizedek, who blessed Abra- 
ham returning from his victory and received 
from him, as was his right, a tenth of the spoil. 
In the Cuneiform inscription the word Jerusalem 
means " City of Peace." It was the Sanctuary 
of the God of Peace, and its Priest and King 
was a Type of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who was 
to come to us as the Prince of Peace. So that 
when you read the story of Melchizedek, you 
will be able to feel that there is no story in the 
Old Testament which rests upon stronger evi- 
dence. Ebed-Tob must have lived just about 



xiii.] GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 141 

midway between the time of Abraham and that 
of Moses, that is, about 200 years, perhaps, after 
the time of Melchizedek. And then, another 
little lesson that we may learn just in passing : 
that it is generally safer to trust the Bible than 
the clever people who think they know so much 
more about what happened in those days than 
those who lived in those times and who wrote 
the Bible. 

We are expressly told in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews that Melchizedek was a Type of Christ, 
and especially of Him in His Priestly Office ; 
that Christ remaineth a Priest for ever after the 
order of Melchizedek, that is, that although the 
Christian Priest now stands at the Altar and cele- 
brates the Divine Mysteries and offers the Eter- 
nal Sacrifice, yet it is only as the Representative 
of Christ. He it is who is the True Priest at 
the Altar, Who is at once Priest and Victim, and 
Who gives to us, as He did to His Apostles on 
the last night of His Life, His own Body and 
Blood. 

Now, dear children, I want you to learn two 



142 MELCHIZEDEK [xm. 

tilings from the story of Melchizedek. First, 
what it is that the Church gives to you ; and 
then, secondly, what you are bound to give to 
the Church. 

Melchizedek blessed Abraham and gave him 
L>read and wine as a Type of the Blessed Sacra- 
ment of the Body and Blood of Christ, which 
the True Melchizedek, our Lord Himself, gives 
to us in the Holy Communion. And never for- 
get what That is — the Greatest of all gifts to us. 
Nothing that the world can give us, nothing that 
the world possesses is so great. Without It 
no Life, no Strength, no Peace, no Joy, no Love ; 
with It we have all things, because we have 
Christ, Who is All. And then remember you 
can get It nowhere else than in the Church. I 
hope none of you would ever be likely to join 
any of the Sects. If you did, you would not 
have the Blessed Sacrament. Perhaps you may 
be thinking, " But the Sects say they have the 
Holy Communion." No, my children, God has 
been very good in preserving them from saying 
what is not true. They say that they give you 



xiii.] GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 143 

bread and wine in commemoration of the Death 
of our Lord, but they none of them pretend that 
that Bread and Wine is the Real Body and Blood 
of Christ. Only the Church, which has a valid 
Priesthood, can give That. So, then, first you 
are to learn from Melchizedek what is the Great- 
est of all the Gifts of the Church to her chil- 
dren, the Gift of the Blessed Sacrament. 

Secondly, you can learn from that story your 
own duty to the Church. Melchizedek gave to 
Abraham the bread and wine ; Abraham gave to 
Melchizedek tithes of all that he possessed. 
There is nothing more clear in the Bible than 
the duty of giving to God one-tenth of all that 
we have. We find it not only mentioned in the 
case of Abraham and others, as a thing which 
they did ; we find it as part of the direct com- 
mandment of God. In the third chapter of the 
Book of Malachi we read that when the Jews 
had become very negligent in this duty, God 
sent to them the Prophet Malachi, and he said : 
" Will a man rob God f Yet ye have robbed me. 
But ye say. Wherein have we robbed thee f In 



144 



MELCHIZEDEK 



[xiii. 



tithes and offerings. Ye are cursed with a 
curse : for ye have robbed one, even this whole 
nation. Bring ye all the tithes into the store- 
house, that there may be meat in mine house, 
and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of 
hosts, if 1 will not open you the windows of 
heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there 
shall not be room enough to receive it " (Mai. 
iii. 8-11). 

Now here you see what God calls the sin of 
neglecting to give one-tenth of our means to 
God. He calls it " robbing God." We think 
it a great sin to rob our fellow-man. A 
man who robs another is put in prison and 
punished, or has to run away and leave the 
country, and God tells us that those who rob Him 
in this way will not escape without punishment, 
either in this world or in the world to come. But 
not only does God tell Malachi to warn people 
about the consequences of neglecting their duty 
in almsgiving, but also to promise them that if 
they perform that duty He will most abun- 
dantly bless them, — as the words which I have 



xiii.] GIFTS AND CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH 145 

just read you say : "Prove me, . ... if I 
ivill not open you the windows of heaven, and 
pour yon out a Messing, that there shall not Is 
room enough to receive it? 

Begin, dear children, to make this rule of alms- 
giving now. Of all your pocket-money put by 
one-tenth, however little that may be, for God 
and His poor, and then all through your life 
keep this rule, and God will bless you. Remem- 
ber what the Church does for you, What the 
Church gives you — all that is worth having 
in this world, all that can make life happy — and 
remember also that the Church cannot do her 
work among the poor and needy without your 
help, and so gladly give a fixed part of that which 
God gives to you, and in giving remember that 
no money can be so well invested as that which 
is spent in God's service. 

ANALYSIS. 

The discovery at Tel-el-Amarna of the letters- 
of one of Melehizedek's successors, Ebed-Tob, 
King of Jerusalem. 



146 



MELCHIZEDEK 



[xiii. 



Melchizedek was a Type of Christ, Who is the 
True King and Priest of Salem, our Great High 
Priest, the Prince of Peace. 
Two lessons from Melchizedek. 
i. What the Church gives you — the Blessed 

Sacrament. 
ii. What you must give the Church — a tenth 
of all that God bestows upon you. 



XIV 

ISAAC 

THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFERING 

"By faith Abraham, when he was tried, offered up 
Isaac : and he that had received the promises offered up 
his only begotten son, of whom it was said, That in 
Isaac shall thy seed be called : accounting that God was 
able to raise him up, even from the dead ; from whence 
also he received him in a figure." — Heb. xi. 17-20. 

If I were to ask you, my dear children, what 
was the principal event in the life of Isaac, I do 
not doubt you would say, and rightly, his being 
offered to God as a Sacrifice by his father Abra- 
ham. But why was it such an important event, 
when he was only offered in will, not in deed ? 
for, as you know, God sent an angel to stay 
Abraham's hand, and showed him a ram caught 
in the thicket by its horns, which was really 
sacrificed in Isaac's place. Why do you sup- 
pose it was so important an event? Because it 

(147) 



148 



ISAAC 



[xiv. 



was a great prophecy in act of the Redemption 
of the world through our Lord — of the great 
Sacrifice which was to be offered upon Mount 
Calvary for the sins of all the world. 

You have often seen the Acolytes light up the 
Altar before the High Celebration on Sunday. 
For whom is it done ? It is to tell you that He 
is coming, Who is the Light of the world, and 
as candle after candle is lighted it is a prepara- 
tion for the coming of Christ in the Holy Sac- 
rament, Who is Light of Light, God of God. 
And so it was in the history of the world from 
the time of the Fall to our Lord's First Advent. 
It was, a period of deep darkness, so far as faith 
and goodness were concerned, and each proph- 
ecy and each type was like the lighting of one 
more candle on the great Altar of Creation, one 
more light to make the darkness a little less, to 
point a little more clearly to the coming of that 
Light Who u lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world" (St. John i. 9) ; the dawning of that 
Sun of Righteousness before Whose Presence all 
darkness must hie away. And hence we see 



xiv.] THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFERING 149 

the great importance of those characters who 
were types of Christ, in that they not only 
pointed to His Coming, but foreshadowed the 
character of His Life and Work. 

But I do not mean to talk to you about Isaac 
as a Type of Christ to-day, so much as to point 
out to you the example he sets us of patient suf- 
fering, of leaving ourselves absolutely in God's 
hands because we realize that God is so wise 
and loves us so much that whatever He sends us 
must be for our good. 

But let us take up the story. In the twenty- 
second chapter of Genesis we are told that God 
said to Abraham : "Take now thy son, thine 
only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee 
into the land of Moriah ; and offer him there 
for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains 
which I will tell thee of And Abraham rose 
up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, 
and took two of his young men with him, and 
Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt 
offering, and rose up, and went unto the place 
of which God had told him" (Gen. xxii. 2, 3). 



150 



ISAAC 



[xiv. 



What a terrible command this must have 
seemed to Abraham ! God had given him in 
his old age Isaac, and had promised that 
through him all nations should be blessed, and 
now God commanded him with his own hand 
to kill Isaac, to make it, humanly speaking, im- 
possible that that promise should ever be ful- 
filled. Abraham found it hard when he became 
an old man to have no son, but how much 
harder, after Isaac had twined himself, as it 
were, around his heart — how much harder, not 
only to part with him, but that he, his father, 
should strike the blow which should take his 
life ! And yet it is evident that Abraham did 
not hesitate for one moment in his obedience, 
did not even try to put off as long as possible 
the fatal moment. No, we are told that he 
" rose up early in the morningP His obedi- 
ence was prompt, as well as thorough. There 
was no complaining. He believed in God so 
fully that he was sure what God commanded 
must be right, and, dear children, what I want 
you to notice particularly (because I find people 



xiv.] THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFERING 151 

generally have a very mistaken idea about Abra- 
ham's sacrifice of Isaac) is that the Epistle to the 
Hebrews in my text tells us very clearly that in 
offering up Isaac he was sure " that God was 
able to raise him, up, even from the dead" (Heb. 
xi. 19) ; so that he did not sacrifice him feeling 
he was to lose him forever, but in the perfect 
faith that in some marvellous manner God w r ould 
raise him up from the dead and give him back 
to him. So Abraham shows his faith in the 
Eesurrection. 

On the third day of their journey Abraham 
lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off, and 
telling his servants to stay there, he laid the 
wood upon Isaac his son, and himself taking the 
fire and the knife, they went both of them to- 
gether. Here we have a picture and type of 
our Lord bearing His Cross up Mount Calvary. 
And then Isaac asked of his father the natural 
question, " Where is the lamb for a burnt offer- 
ing?" and Abraham said, "My son, God will 
provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering" 
Ah, how true it was, " God will provide a 



152 ISAAC [xiv. 

Lamb ! " Abraham thought, as he uttered the 
words, of Isaac as the lamb. God sent, as you 
know, dear children, a ram caught by its horns 
in a thicket to take the place of Isaac, and it 
was from that event that Abraham called the 
place " Jehovah- jireh," — "The Lord will pro- 
vide." But how much more true was it in the 
far future ! Little did Abraham know the great 
prophecy he was uttering, and that God would 
provide a Lamb — His Own Dear Son — to take 
the place of all those poor lambs which year 
after year were offered at the Paschal Feast ; to 
take the place of all poor sinners ; to make the 
one sufficient atonement and expiation for all 
the sins of the world. 

"And they came to the place which God had 
told him of ; and Abraham built an altar there, 
and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac 
his son, and laid him on the altar upon the 
wood " (Verse 9). Isaac learned then who was 
to be the lamb. Here again we have a type of 
our Blessed Lord in the passive obedience of 
Isaac. There were no complaints, there was no 



xiv.] THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFERING 153 

struggle. Like Him to Whom be pointed, " he 
is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a 
sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth 
not his month " (Isa. liii. 7). 

Now this brings me to the lesson that I want 
you especially to learn to-day from the story of 
Isaac — resignation to God's Will in suffering. 
All suffering, my children, is the result of sin 
(though not necessarily the sin of the one who 
suffers), and part of its penance, by which satis- 
faction is made to the Justice of God. It is a 
Law of God that sin must be punished, either in 
this world or in the world to come ; not an arbi- 
trary law, but like all God's Laws, necessary, that 
is, it could not be otherwise. We know that if 
we break the laws of Nature we must suffer ; 
that if we put our hand in the fire it will burn 
us, that if we fall over a precipice we shall be 
killed ; and so it is in Moral Nature, for the 
Laws of the Material and the Moral Kingdoms 
are both God's Laws. But all the sufferings of 
the world taken together were quite insufficient 
to make any satisfaction to the Justice of God, 



154 ISAAC [xiv. 

until Christ came, and "by His Oblation of 
Himself once offered" made "a full, perfect, 
and sufficient Sacrifice, Oblation, and Satisfac- 
tion ior the sins of the whole world." Now 
while He has done the great Work and by His 
Cross and Passion has made satisfaction for our 
sins, He still allows us, for our good, to bear 
some suffering ; just as He now " ever liveth to 
make intercession for us" (Heb. vii. 25), and 
yet calls upon us, in our poor prayers for one 
another, to join Him in this great work of In- 
tercession. So St. Peter tells us that Pie " suf- 
fered for us , leaving us an example, that ye 
should follow his steps" (1 St. Peter ii. 21). 
We see this in a figure in our Lord's own Cross- 
bearing, for while like Isaac the Cross was laid 
upon Him and He bore it, yet He allowed Simon 
of Cyrene at the last to bear it after Him. So St. 
Paul says, writing to the Colossians : I " rejoice 
in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which 
is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh 
for his lody's sake, which is the church" (Col. 
i. 24). We should try to remember this, dear 



xiv.] THE PRIVILEGE OE SUFFERING 155 

children, that all our sufferings have to do with 
sin, and that if they are borne patiently, and 
lovingly offered to God in union with the Suf- 
ferings of Christ, they are acceptable to Him 
and form part of that great Treasure of Suffer- 
ings by which sin is expiated. 

Hence suffering is a privilege, first because it 
unites us to Christ and makes us more like the 
Man of Sorrows, because it is the means by 
which w r e take up our Cross and follow Him ; 
and then also because it is through suffering that 
w r e are to be sanctified. It is in the furnace of 
affliction that we are to be tried and the dross 
burned out of us, that we may be pure gold, fit 
for Christ's Kingdom in Heaven. Suffering has 
not always this result. Sometimes it only sours 
and embitters those w T ho suffer. Often we see 
a suffering child who is only made peevish and 
discontented by its pains. Bat sometimes it is 
otherwise, and beneath the suffering frame the 
light of Sanctity shines forth with the beauty of 
a will lovingly resigned to God's Will, the glory 



156 ISAAC [xi v. 

of a life spent in patiently suffering, in gently 
bearing the Cross which God has sent. 

Most of you, dear children, I suppose know 
little of suffering beyond the name ; know little 
of pain, either of body or mind or soul. But it 
is almost sure to come to you. Suffering will 
enter your life, and then you must try like Isaac 
to leave yourself in the hands of God, and only 
to ask for grace that you may patiently suffer 
His Will, joining your little pains with the 
Pains which our Lord endured for you on the 
Cross, and by which your sufferings become 
precious in His sight. Many people look upon 
pain as though it were a mark of God's anger, 
as though it were the one great evil of the world. 
No, dear children, the only evil is sin, not pain. 
Try to understand what suffering means ; that 
since Christ suffered it is a great privilege, a 
means of union with Him, a means of sanctity 
to ourselves ; and so now, while you are young 
and happy and free from suffering, learn its true 
laws, that when it is God's Will to send you the 
Cross you may cheerfully bear it for His sake. 



xiv.] THE PRIVILEGE OF SUFFERING 157 
ANALYSIS. 

I. Prophecies and types pointed to and pre- 
pared for Christ. 

II. Abraham's trial of faith in sacrificing 
Isaac was prompt and thorough, but with a be- 
lief that God would raise him from the dead. 

III. i. Isaac bearing the wood up the moun- 
tain a type of our Lord bearing His Cross. 

ii. Isaac bound to the wood and uncomplain- 
ing a type of our Lord as described in 
Isaiah liii. 7. 

IV. All suffering is the result of sin, part of 
its penance. Our Lord made the one full Satis- 
faction on the Cross, but calls us to follow His 
steps of suffering and to join Him in this work. 

Suffering is therefore a privilege ; because if 
rightly borne : 

i. It unites us to Christ. 
ii. It becomes a means of sanctification. 



XV 

ESAU 

MAN'S ADMIRATION, GOD'S AVERSION 

" Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated."— Rom. 
ix. 13. 

This text at first sight raises a very difficult 
question — why God should love Jacob but hate 
Esau. For as we read the story of Esau and 
Jacob, Jacob's character is so full of faults, so 
mean, so unattractive, while Esau seems so frank 
and generous, such a " thorough gentleman," as 
we would say, the very ideal of a man of the 
world, endowed with great natural virtues and 
splendid gifts, courageous, good natured, a dar- 
ing huntsman, a brave warrior, just what the 
world admires ! And yet God says, "Jacob have 
I loved, but Esau have I hatedP Let us see, 
dear children, if we can find the cause of God's 

aversion to Esau. 
(i$8) 



xv.] GOD'S A VERSION 159 

Esau was hateful to God because when God 
endowed him so abundantly with gifts and 
graces, when he owed so much to God, he ut- 
terly forgot God and neglected altogether to 
serve Him. 

(I.) Is anything more shameful than ingrati- 
tude ? And what was there that Esau possessed 
that had not been God's gift to him ? 

(i.) First, God had given him great natural 
gifts of mind and body and soul. He seems to 
have been handsome in person, strong and skil- 
ful with his weapons in the chase, good-natured 
and open in his dealings with men, a general 
favorite. 

(ii.) Then God had given him great opportu- 
nities. He was the eldest son of a great prince, 
and he inherited the Birthright which his ances- 
tors had prized so dearly, but which he despised 
so that he sold it to his brother, in derision, for 
a mess of pottage. 

(iii.) Thirdly, God had given him, to help him, 
good examples ; a pious father — for Isaac was a 
truly religious man, a man of prayer and faith — 



160 ESA U [xv. 

and a religious home, and yet with all this Esau 
grew up the very type of a thoroughly irreligious 
man. He cared not for God or His Promises ; 
the neglected to serve Him, he lived for the 
world and for self. 

(II.) Again, Esau was hateful to God because 
of his evil influence and example, for the very 
fact of his natural virtues and gifts made his ex- 
ample so much more attractive to those around 
him. He was not without natural affection, he 
seems really to have loved his old father, but ev- 
erything about Esau was simply of the gifts of 
nature, and the endowments of grace he de- 
spised and rejected. It was easy for Esau to live 
what the world would call a good life, just as it 
is easy for some worldly men now to live moral 
lives, because their temperament helps them and 
Satan takes care that they shall have very few 
temptations to lead them astray, for he well 
knows that worldly men who live good, moral 
lives are his best advertisements. But God cares 
not for natural virtues, but for those which are 
the outcome of His Grace. 



xv.] GOD'S A VERSION' 161 

And so we have the contrast between the two 
brothers, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, with strong 
besetting sins, with a naturally unattractive tem- 
perament, with a habit of duplicity formed early 
in life and the inheritance of the sin of Covet- 
ousness, and yet with a great realization of the 
beauty of religion, with a strong desire to serve 
God, with wonderful perseverance endeavoring 
to overcome his sins, and with great patience en- 
during the trials and sorrows which came to him 
in such abundance as a punishment for those 
sins. In Esau we have a naturally attractive 
character without religion, without grace, without 
God ; in Jacob one who in his early life was led 
into serious sin, though he did his best, to the 
very end of his days, to overcome his faults. 
Esau, a man who desired to possess God's most 
generous gifts without God ; Jacob, a man with 
much fewer gifts, but who strove with all his 
might to possess God, to gain the blessing of 
God. 

So with children. It is not always those who 
are most attractive that God loves best, not 



162 ESA U [xv. 

nlways those who are bright and amiable and 
cheerful and pleasing to their companions and to 
their older friends, who are pleasing to God ; for 
they may do it simply in the power of the gifts 
with which God endowed them when they were 
born, or they may strive to please others only to 
win their praise and so to gratify their own 
pride and self-love. There are many children 
who seem rather stupid and have great difficulty 
in learning their lessons and are probably 
awkward in their appearance, but who say their 
prayers and wish to be pure and good, and these 
are the ones whom God loves. 

But before we finish our sermon, let us com- 
pare Esau with three of the men whose lives are 
recorded in the Book of Genesis. And first, 
with Lot. Lot, as I told you when I was preach- 
ing to you about him, was a good man with one 
strong besetting sin — the sin of worldliness, the 
love of money. Esau is the very type of world- 
liness, though not perhaps so much in love of 
money as in love of popularity and the praise of 
men. Lot with all his worldliness still loved 



xv.] GOD'S A VERSION 163 

God and wished to serve Him, and so God in 
His mercy sent Lot a great trial — took away all 
his possessions, for you remember that he had to 
flee from Sodom and take refuge in a cave in the 
mountains, leaving behind all that he possessed. 
God sent Lot a great trial in this life, by which 
his love of the world was entirely overcome, and 
he died in poverty, but with his soul clinging to 
God, and, as we know from St. Peter, he was 
saved. Esau, on the other hand, possessed his 
worldly goods to the end of his life, grew richer 
and more successful and powerful and founded 
a great nation, the Edomites, and died ; but St. 
Paul tells us, quoting from the Prophet Malachi 
(chapter i. verse 3), that God hated Esau. How 
terrible it must be in another world to be the 
object of God's aversion, to be lost forever ! 

But I do not wish you, dear children, to think 
that goodness is incompatible with prosperity in 
this world, and so the other two men with whom 
we will contrast Esau shall be two upon whom 
God showered abundant gifts of wealth in this 
life, and yet who were quite unworldly, who 



164 ESA U [xv. 

were two of his greatest Saints. I mean Abra- 
ham and Joseph. We are told that Abraham 
was very rich and that God prospered him so 
abundantly that his riches immensely increased, 
and yet we know that Abraham was not covetous, 
for he allowed his nephew Lot to choose the best 
pasturage when he as the elder had the right of 
choice, and when the King of Sodom offered to 
give him all the spoils that he had taken in his 
victory over Chedorlaomer— and of course they 
belonged to Abraham by right of conquest — 
he refused to touch any himself and gave back 
all his share to the King of Sodom. So Abra- 
ham, while he was very rich, did not live for 
money, was not worldly, and we know that his 
whole life was spent in serving God. 

And then Joseph, after he was made ruler of 
Egypt, became a very rich man, and he, we know, 
thought far more of doing good and relieving 
distress and feeding the hungry than he did of 
making money, so that we see that if we serve 
God first, God will bless us ; indeed we learn 
this both from the Old and the New Testa- 



xv.] GOD'S AVERSION T65 

ments, for, as I reminded you in my sermon on 
Melehizedek, God said by the Prophet Malachi 
that if we give Him tithes He will open the 
windows of Heaven and pour out a blessing upon 
us, and our Lord Jesus Christ said in the Ser- 
mon on the Mount : " Seek ye first the king- 
dom of God, and his righteousness; and all these 
things shall he added unto you " (St. Matthew 
vi. 33). 

So we may learn from Esau that if God has 
given us great natural gifts it is that we may use 
them in His service, but that natural gifts can 
never in God's sight take the place of works that 
are done in the power of His Grace ; and we are 
warned too of the danger of resting satisfied 
with worldly popu'arity instead of striving to 
please God, and so to win His Love. 

ANALYSIS. 

Jacob seems so unattractive, Esau so generous ; 
why then did God love Jacob and hate Esau ? 

I. Because of his ingratitude. God had given 
him : 



i66 



ESAU 



[xv. 



i. Great natural gifts of mind and body and 

soul, 
ii. Great opportunities in life, 
iii. Good examples. 

II. Because of the attractiveness of his evil 
example. 

III. The contrast between the naturally beau- 
tiful character without religion, and the natu- 
rally mean character with it. 

IY. Esau was a contrast : 

i. To Lot ; both loved the world, but Lot was 

a righteous man and God in love took 

away all that he possessed in the world 

that his soul might be saved, 
ii. To Abraham and Joseph ; both were very 

prosperous in worldly goods, but both 

were quite unworldly. 
So God prospers those who do not make riches 

the end of their life. 






XYI 

J AC OB- 1 

BESETTING SINS 

"Few and evil have the days of the years of ray life 
been." — Gen. xlvii. 9. 

What a strange life was Jacob's for a great 
life ! A life of promise ending in bitter disap- 
pointment ; a life of sorrow and toil with but 
little reward here ; a life spoiled by a besetting 
sin ; for that was the explanation of it, a great 
life spoiled by a besetting sin ! How many lives 
have been ruined by the same cause ! Judas 
was an Apostle, was almost a saint, but not only 
his life was spoiled but his soul was lost through 
an unconquered besetting sin. Jacob seems to 
have inherited the acquisitiveness of his mother's 
family ; for Laban stands before us, both in 

the scene in which Eliezer obtained his sister as 
(167) 



168 JACOB—I [xvi. 

Isaac's wife, and also in all his dealings with 
Jacob, as a thoroughly covetous man, one who 
loved money and prosperity with the passion 
almost of a miser. And Jacob with this in- 
ordinate desire to possess was also unscrupulous 
in bis methods of attaining his ends ; the end to 
him seemed so desirable and he longed for it so in- 
tensely that again and again he used the most 
unworthy means to reach it. His besetting sins 
were covetousness and that duplicity which so 
often accompanies it. 

Jacob's childhood was the time when the sin 
was developed. The germ seems to have been 
inherited. He had a thoroughly unhealthy home. 
There was favoritism on the part of both his 
parents ; Isaac preferred Esau, his mother cared 
more for him, and among the first things that 
he saw was his mother deceiving his father in 
order to further her ends, in order to obtain for 
him the blessing, and Isaac weakly allowing the 
sins of his older brother Esau. 

We are told of two instances in which cov- 
etousness showed itself most markedly in his 



xvi.] BESETTING SIXS 169 

early life. The first was when lie bought from 
Esau the birthright for a mess of pottage. The 
birthright had been promised him by God. 
It was a spiritual gift, to be possessed in its ful- 
ness only in the future, a thing indeed to be de- 
sired, but not to be obtained as he obtained it, by 
unlawful means. His sin was in trusting to his 
own cunning to obtain what was desirable in it- 
self, rather than relying upon God's promise to 
give it to him. And then later, when his father 
seemed to be dying and desired to bestow his ben- 
ediction upon Esau, Jacob, by his mother's sug- 
gestion, obtained the blessing by the most dis- 
graceful deception practiced upon his poor blind 
father. While Esau was out hunting, simulat- 
ing his brother's voice and raiment and taking 
advantage of the old man's blindness, Jacob won 
and obtained that benediction which God had all 
along meant him to have, but which, instead of 
trusting to God's promise, he snatched by such 
unworthy means. We may be sure that if he 
had trusted God, he would have received the 
blessing, but when he thought he saw it going 



JACOB— I 



[xvi. 



to Esau he at his mother's advice was guilty of 
a sin of deception, which stands out as the great 
blot upon his life. 

Such was his besetting sin, and oh, how sad 
was its punishment ! Driven out from home an 
exile, his penance was life-long. Driven out 
from home as it were to begin life again in the 
world, with no other inheritance than those two 
strong sins which were the misery of his life ; 
the rest of his life a struggle against them, a real 
effort to overcome them, but the besetting sins 
coming up again and again and spoiling all the 
beauty and peace and happiness of his life. On 
the other hand we must remember that he was 
a really religious man, he tried to conquer those 
sins, but in his childhood they had been so fos- 
tered, and allowed to gain such a hold upon him 
that to the very end of his life they do not seem 
to have been entirely removed. In addition to 
the punishment of exile and to the struggle with 
sin, there were his sorrows of labor with Laban, 
who defrauded him of his wages, the grief 
caused by his own disobedient and wicked chil- 



xvi.] BESETTING SINS 171 

dren, the loss of Joseph, whom he loved ; and 
yet he persevered struggling, and at last, after 
the night spent in wrestling at Jabbok, — U I 
will not let thee go, except tJwu bless me " (Gen. 
xxxii.26), — he won fromGod the blessing: "Thy 
name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel: 
for as a prince hast thou power with God and 
with men, and hast prevailed" (Verse 28). 
Yet how much sin, how much sorrow might 
have been avoided if only he had not begun 
with those two strong sins spoiling an otherwise 
beautiful character. 

Now, my dear children, the lesson that Jacob 
teaches is very simple, very clear, and very im- 
portant. It is, of course, the necessity of con- 
quering besetting sins whilst we are young, of 
meeting them and overthrowing them before 
they have obtained a real hold upon our char- 
acter. We all have besetting sins. "We must 
strive first to discover exactly what they are, and 
this is no easy task, for Satan and self-love will 
try to deceive us ; and then we must at once set 
to work to root them up out of our character. 



172 



JACOB— I 



[xvi. 



You cannot realize, dear children, as those who 
are older can, the joy and strength of beginning 
life in the world free, instead of beginning it a 
slave to sin ; so that we must all try really to 
know our sins. How are they to be discovered, 
these besetting sins, which try to elude our 
search, hiding away in the lurking-places of our 
soul, — putting forth their fruit instead of their 
roots ? By daily self-examination. Strive to find 
out, dear children, every night what you have 
done wrong during the day, and then try to notice 
every week what sin there is that comes up con- 
tinually, what sin there is that seems to be as it 
were a part of yourself — that is your besetting 
sin. Then when you have by self-examination 
learned to know the sin, by penitence and prayer 
strive to conquer it; by prayer, asking for 
God's grace for the struggle, and then by acts 
of penitence rooting up each weed of sin as it 
appears in the pathway of your life. You know 
how quickly weeds grow, but if we watch and 
pull up each weed as it appears, how much easier 
it is to keep them under than if we let them go 



xvi.] BESETTING SINS 173 

on and get started and get their roots well into 
the soil before we begin our work of weeding. 
Penitence is the means by which you must pull 
up the weeds, by which you must eradicate the 
sin ; and then prayer — prayer for God's grace. 
But that is not all. Your own will must do its 
part. That God will give abundant grace in 
answer to prayer we are absolutely certain, and 
when we fall we know it is not because we have 
not sufficient grace, but because our own wills 
do not co-operate with that grace. Do not 
think that God will take away your sin in an- 
swer to your prayer. If He did, He would 
simply leave as it were the root of that sin in 
your nature to come up again. No, in answer 
to prayer God will give you that grace 
that will enable you to conquer the sin so that 
you will be stronger than if you had never had 
it. 

And then remember that besetting sins are 
not only sins of word and act but also sins of 
thought. It was not merely that Jacob in word 
and act deceived Esau and his father. That was 



174 JACOB— I [xvi. 

the outcome of his sin, but it began in his 
thoughts, in that inordinate desire for the birth- 
right which led him to distrust God's promise 
and to use such deceitful methods to obtain that 
which he was probably always thinking about. 
If we are contented only to fight our sins in acts 
and words we shall never root them up from 
our heart, nay, it is even more important to con- 
quer the very stronghold of sin in our thoughts, 
for if we can stop them there we may be quite 
sure that the acts and words will fall off of their 
own accord. 

Now, dear children, remember that Jacob was 
a very great man, a man with immense strength 
of character, a man whose life began with the 
most glorious promises, a man with a strong re- 
ligious temperament, one who wished to love 
and serve God, yet much of his life was spoiled 
and the promises ended in disappointment, just 
because in his childhood he allowed a besetting 
sin to grow unchecked, until it had obtained 
euch control over him that it took all the rest of 
his life to try to overcome it. And this is very 



xvi.] BESETTING SINS 175 

common. Many wake up to it when too late, 
when like Jacob there is nothing left but weary 
struggle to keep the sin under. Begin now, 
while sin is weak in you ; begin now and con- 
quer your besetting sins, and when you grow up 
to manhood and womanhood and go out to your 
true life in the world, you will go out with a 
sense of conscious freedom and strength, to 
bring forth good fruit to the glory of God and 
your own great happiness. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. A great life spoiled by a besetting sin : 
i. In childhood it developed, the danger of 

an unhealthy home, 
ii. Twice especially covetousness showed itself, 

in purchasing the birthright, and stealing 

the blessing, 
iii. The punishment was terrible and life-long : 

the struggle with the sin, and to be the 

victim of the deceit of others, 
iv. Yet Jacob was a reallj religious man and 

tried to conquer his faults. 



JACOB— I 



[xvi. 



II. The lesson : Conquer besetting sins while 
you are young. 

i. You must discover them by self-examina- 
tion. 

ii. Root them out by penitence, 
iii. Watch against their return. 



XVII 

JACOB— II 
THE VISION OF HEAVEN 

"And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there 
all night, because the sun was set ; and he took of the 
stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay 
down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and be- 
hold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it 
reached to heaven : and behold the angels of God as- 
cending and descending on it. And, behold, the Lord 
stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham 
thy father, and the God of Isaac : the land whereon thou 
liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. "— Gen. 
xxviii, 11-14. 

Jacob's first night away from home ! and 
Jacob was very fond of home. He had been 
brought up to depend very much upon the 
affections of home-life, and this first night away 
was not spent among friends, by a cheerful fire- 
side, talking about those he loved, but alone in 
a wilderness, the only roof the stars, his only 

(177; 



178 JACOB— II [xvn. 

bed the ground, his pillow a stone, the noises of 
the night around him, the growls of the wild 
beasts, from which he was entirely unprotected, 
and what made it worse, the thought : " It is 
my own fault ; my dangers and misery are the 
results of my own sin." 

Poor Jacob ! Do you not think, dear child- 
ren, that he must have felt very unhappy and 
perhaps very much afraid ? The world was be- 
fore him, and he had no idea how it might treat 
him. If he were not devoured by wild beasts 
or -killed by robbers, he hoped to make his way 
to Haran, where his uncle Laban, his mother's 
brother, lived, but he was a stranger there and 
had never seen Laban, and did not know at all 
how he would be received. Laban did not 
know he was coming, and so would not expect 
him. He had no idea what sort of man his 
uncle was. Yes, dear children, this must have 
been a very dark moment in Jacob's life, his 
heart must have been very heavy, he must have 
realized then the bitterness of sin and its terrible 
consequences. 



xvii.] THE VISION OF HE A VEN 179 

But the night drew on, and weary with his 
long walk, Jacob lay down to sleep. He 
dreamed — it was no ordinary dream, but a 
wondrous vision, sent him by God. He saw a 
ladder which touched both earth and Heaven, 
and up and down the ladder the Angels of God 
ascending and descending, and above the ladder 
the Lord Himself stood. That ladder repre- 
sented the Sacred Humanity of our Blessed 
Lord, for this vision was one of the great re- 
velations of the Incarnation, of the Coming of 
God the Son to take our nature upon Him, to 
be made Man. And the Angels of God ascend- 
ing and descending are there because they al- 
ways wait upon our Blessed Lord, where He is 
they cluster around Him ; so that we say in the 
Office of the Holy Eucharist, just before the 
Consecration : u With Angels and Archangels, 
and with all the Company of Heaven, we laud 
and magnify Thy glorious Name." 

Now, if we turn to the Gospel of St. John, 
the first chapter and the fifty-first verse, we 
shall find that our Blessed Lord said to Nathan- 



180 JACOB— II [xvn. 

ael : " Ilereafter ye shall see heaven open, and 
the angels of God ascending and descending 
upon the Son of man" I am afraid there are 
many people who read this verse without notic- 
ing that our Lord is referring to Jacob's vision, 
and is explaining clearly that that vision pointed 
to His Own Incarnation, so that we are not left 
merely to our own ideas in saying that the 
ladder with the Angels ascending and descend- 
ing was a revelation of the Incarnation, but we 
have our Lord's own definite teaching that it 
was so. Let us stop for a moment, while I 
point this out to you a little more fully. When 
ISfathanael came to our Blessed Lord, brought by 
St. Philip, our Lord said of him : " Behold an 
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile /" (Verse 
47). Now what did our Lord mean by these 
words, " an Israelite in whom is no guile ? " 
The first who bore the name of Israel, you 
know, was Jacob, for that name, which means 
"A Prince of God," was given him by the 
Angel at Peniel, when after he had wrestled all 
night he said, "/ will not let thee go, except 



xvil] THE VISION OF HEAVEN 181 

thou bless me" (Gen. xxxii, 26). And tlie 
Angel said : " Thy name shall Recalled no more 
Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou 
power with God and with men, and hast "pre- 
vailed" (Verse 28). But the great character- 
istic of poor Jacob was not that he was without 
guile, but that he was full of guile — duplicity 
was one of his besetting sins ; and so our Lord 
says of Nathanael that while he was like Jacob 
in prevailing with God in prayer — for doubtless 
that is what our Lord meant when he said : 
" When thou wast under the Jig tree, I saw 
thee" for under that fig tree Nathanael was 
probably pouring forth his soul in prayer (St. 
John i. 48) — yet he was unlike Jacob in that 
he was perfectly simple and sincere. And then 
our Lord, having thus referred to the story of 
Jacob, which Nathanael, as an Israelite, would 
at once understand, goes on further to refer to 
Jacob's Vision, saying that what Jacob saw 
only in dream, they should see in reality — the 
Angels of God ascending and descending, not 
upon a ladder, but upon Him Whom the ladder 



182 



JACOB— II 



[XVII. 



represented, the Son of Man, Who, being 
God, for our sakes became Man. So we find 
Angels ministering to Him during His Life ; at 
the Temptation, which had then just taken 
place, in His Passion, at His Resurrection, and 
a cloud of Angels which received Him out of 
the Apostles' sight as He went up to His 
Throne in Heaven in His glorious Ascension. 
And so to-day, when His Sacred Humanity, 
"Which is forever joined to His Divinity, is pres- 
ent upon the Altar in the Holy Eucharist, al- 
though we cannot see them, that Altar is sur- 
rounded by Angels worshipping with us our 
Lord Jesus Christ, the King both of Angels 
and of Saints. 

Then besides the vision that Jacob saw at 
Beth-el, there was the promise of God : "The 
land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, 
and to thy seed/ and thy seed shall he as the 
dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad 
to the wes^ and to the east, and to the north, 
and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed 
shall all the families of the earth be blessed. 



xvii.] THE VISION OF HE A VEN 183 

And, behold, I am with thee, and will 'keep thee 
in all places whither thou goest, and will bring 
thee again into this land/ for 1 will not leave 
thee, until I have done that which I have spoken 
to thee of" (Gen. xxviii. 13-16). What a glorious 
promise ! Not only that He would give to him 
and to his seed that land, not only that in the 
future his seed should be as the dust of the 
earth, and that in them all the families of the 
earth should be blessed — that is, that from his 
seed our Lord Jesus Christ should be born, by 
Whom all the world is redeemed — but also that 
in this present life God would be with him, 
would keep him in all places whither he went, 
would bring him back into this land of his 
fathers, and would not leave him until He had 
fulfilled all this promise. 

"And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and 
he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I 
knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, 
How dreadful is this place ! this is none other 
but the house of God, and this is the gate of 
heaven M (Verses 16, 17). This place where 



184 



JACOB— II 



[xvn. 



Jacob slept was a type of God's House, the 
Church ; that House which is indeed the Gate 
of Heaven ; that House where alone in the 
Blessed Sacrament is the Vision of Heaven, 
Angels ascending and descending upon the 
Ladder, the Sacred Humanity of our Blessed 
Lord. 

"And Jacob rose up early in the morning, 
and took the stone that he had put for his pil- 
lows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil 
upon the top of it. And he called the name of 

that place Beth-el And Jacob 

'cowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, 
aad will Tceep me in this way that 1 go, and will 
give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so 
that I come again to my father's house in 
peace* then shall the Lord be my God : and this 
stone, which I have set tip for a pillar, shall be 
God's house : and of all that thou shalt give me 
I will surely give the tenth unto thee " (Yerses 
18-22). He put up a pillar, and poured oil 
upon it, and made a vow. Some people, dear 
children, have quite misunderstood Jacob's vow 



xvii.] THE VISION OF HE A VRN 185 

and thought that it was a soit of bargain that he 
was making with God, that if the Lord would 
take care of him and bring him back in peace, 
then, hut not otherwise, the Lord should be his 
God and he would build a house of God in that 
place and would give a tenth of all that he had 
to God. But that is not at all what JacDb 
meant. If you read carefully, you will see that 
all that he mentions as a condition has been 
already promised him by God, and surely he 
did not mean that if God kept His promise he 
would serve Him, and that if God, did not, he 
would not serve Him. He meant, rather, that 
unless God did take care of him in all the terrible 
dangers which were before him, he could not 
serve God in that or any other place, because he 
could not live. Surely, my children, Jacob 
meant that he realized so fully his own weak- 
ness and sin and the dangers which threatened 
him on every side, that in God alone could he 
put his trust and that if God left him he must 
indeed fail. It is so with us. We cannot say of 
ourselves that we will serve God, for if we 



186 JACOB [xvn. 

know anything of our own hearts we know how 
weak they are, and how little we can trust our- 
selves. We can only say, if God will help us 
and give us His grace, then we will do our part 
in co-operating with that grace and devoting our 
life to God's service. 

You will observe that in Jacob's vow he, like 
Abraham, speaks of the tenth of all his sub- 
stance as belonging to God. No one can serve 
God unless they fulfil this duty. They may 
serve Him with lip-service— that is, in word 
and appearance, but if they realize that He 
is indeed their God, that everything that they 
have comes from His Hand and that they are 
but His stewards, they will be very careful not 
to wait for that Day in which it will be said to 
them : " Give an account of thy stewardship ; 
for thou may est he no longer steward" (St. 
Luke xvi. 2), but they will be striving to give 
in their account every day, and in that account 
to give to God's service at least that which He 
demands, one tenth of all that He in His good- 
ness has bestowed upon them. 



xvii.l THE VISION OF HE A VEN 187 

And then Jacob, under God's blessing and 
protection, as you know, made his way to 
Haran and found his uncle Laban and was re- 
ceived by him kindly, although Laban after- 
wards treated him very unjustly and defrauded 
him again and again of his wages, but he stayed 
with Laban twenty years, and then God brought 
him back, as He promised He would, to the very 
place where he had set up the pillar, to Beth-el. 

Jacob's life, as I told you, dear children, in 
my last sermon, was not a very happy one. It 
was full of trouble and adversity, the penance of 
his sin, and yet to help him to bear it there was 
always the thought of that wondrous Vision at 
Beth-el. He had seen the glories of his true 
Home, Heaven ; God standing above the ladder, 
surrounded by the Angels. So in the New 
Testament, in the Book of Revelation, we are 
told how St. John saw a door set open in 
Heaven and heard a Voice which said : " Come 
up hither, and I will shew thee things ivhich 
must be hereafter " (Bev. iv. 1), and was caught 
up into Heaven itself, and saw the glories of 



188 JACOB [xvii. 

that Kingdom of Love. And we may be sure 
that after this St. John in all his afflictions — 
and you know, my children, he was at this time 
a prisoner working in the mines at Patmos — 
we may be sure that in all his sorrows and ill- 
treatment the remembrance of that Vision so 
absorbed him that he hardly felt the cruelties to 
which he was subjected, hardly thought of the 
afflictions with which he was so abundantly 
visited. And so it may well have been with 
Jacob, and throughout that long life of sorrow and 
disappointment I think we can understand how 
he bore it in the remembrance of that glorious 
Vision. Do you not think, dear children, that 
if you had been privileged to see the very place 
marked out for you by God's love in Heaven, if 
you had been privileged to gaze upon the 
glorious choirs of the Angels, the white-robed 
throng of Saints, and knew that your home was 
one day to be among them, that you would be 
very willing to bear patiently the worst trials of 
earth, that you would never take any very great 
interest in the mere things of this world, they 






xvil] THE VISION OF HE A VEN 189 

would all seem so worthless compared with that 
glory which you had seen ! Well, dear children, 
though you have not seen it with your earthly 
eyes, nor in a dream, like Jacob, nor, perhaps, 
in the Spirit, like St. John, yet you have it re- 
vealed to you by the Church, by the Bible, on 
the evidence of those who have seen it, and you 
should strive to live in the realization of it, 
through faith. Remember ever that the In- 
carnation, the Humanity of our Blessed Lord, is 
our Ladder ; that we are incorporated into Him 
in Baptism ; that we are present, at the Holy 
Eucharist, even though with our earthly eyes 
we do not see it, amongst the very Company of 
Heaven and that nothing but sin can ever 
sever this blessed union, can ever hide this 
glorious Vision from our eyes. Let the thought 
of Heaven, your own true native Land, your 
everlasting, glorious Home, make you patient in 
bearing the trials of earth, make you watchful 
against that sin which alone can rob you of so 
great a prize, make you set your hope beyond 
the grave in the glories of the Beatific Vision, 



190 JACOB [xvn. 

Which shall be your Reward forever in Eter- 
nity. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Jacob's first night away from home, its 
dangers. 

i. His Yision the type of the Incarnation and 
therefore of the Holy Eucharist ; the re- 
lation of the Holy Angels to the Sacred 
Humanity. 
ii. Our Lord's explanation of this to Nathanael 

(St. John i. 47-51). 
iii. God's promise and Jacob's vow (Gen. xxviii. 

13-22). 
iv. That Vision the guiding star of Jacob's 
after life. 



XVIII 

JOSEPH.— 1 

THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS 

"Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, 
because he was the son of his old age : and he made him 
a coat of many colours. And when his brethren saw 
that their father loved him more than all his brethren, 
they hated liim, and could not speak peaceably unto 
him." — Gen. xxxvii. 3, 4. 

There are few stories in the Old Testament 
with which you are more familiar, my dear 
children, than the story of Joseph's Coat of 
Many Colours. Let us spend our time this 
afternoon in trying to see what lessons we may 
learn from it, for you know Saint Paul says that 
all things that were written in the Old Testa- 
ment were written for our admonition. 

Let me tell you first, so that somebody else 
may not upset you by telling you of it, that there 
is a good deal of dispute as to what the word 

(191) 



JOSEPH 



[XVIIL 



means which is translated u coat of many col- 
ours." Some scholars have thought that it does 
not mean " many colours," but " a garment 
with long sleeves," or a long flowing garment 
reaching to the hands and feet, and there have 
been other explanations of it. But not very long 
ago a painting was discovered in Egypt on the 
wall of a subterranean tomb at Beni-Hassan 
representing a procession of Asiatic foreigners 
in w^hich the chieftain was distinguished by the 
ornamentation of his coat of many colours, and 
while this is the earliest and perhaps the best 
example, others have been found, so that it is 
generally now admitted that the old-fashioned 
translation in our Bible is the right one, and 
that the mark of Jacob's love for his son was a 
garment of many colours. 

Now, I am going to ask you to remember three 
questions — (suppose you say them after me) : 

(1). Why did Jacob give Joseph this coat of 
many colours ? 

(2). "What was the result to Joseph of having 
this coat ? 



xviii.] THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS 193 

(3). What did the brothers do with the coat 
when they took it away from him ? 

Now let us try to answer each of these ques 
tions : 

(1). Why did his father give him the coat ? 
Becaused he loved him. And why did he love 
him? We are told that one reason was that 
Joseph was the son of his old age and of his 
favorite wife. But I think we may gather 
from the story of Joseph another and better 
reason — that his brethren were wicked, while 
he was good. Jacob loved him because he 
deserved his love by his great goodness, for 
Joseph was very good. Indeed, dear children, 
of all the different persons in the Old Testa- 
ment who were types of Christ, Joseph is the 
only one of whom we know no fault. 

(2). Now tell me what my second question 
was, — What was the result to Joseph of having 
this coat? In the second verse of my text we 
are told that — 

(a). His brethren hated him, 

(b). could not speak peaceably to him, and 



194 JOSEPH [xviii. 

(c). when they had an opportunity, took the 
coat away from him. 

We know how cruel they were in selling him 
to the Ishmaelites in their hatred. 

(3). And now for my third question : — What 
did Joseph's brothers do with the coat 
when they took it away from him ? 

(a), Did they wear it ? No ; they were envi- 
ous and jealous, and, like the dog in the fable 
of " the dog in the manger," they didn't want 
it for themselves, but they couldn't bear to see 
Joseph keep it. It reminded them of their 
father's love for Joseph and of his own good- 
ness, and that made them think of their wicked- 
ness, not in sorrow and penitence, not with a 
wish to be like Joseph and a resolution to try to 
be better ; no, but with a determination to go 
on in their own way, and a hatred of their 
brother because his goodness was a reproach to 
them. 

(b). They spoiled it. They went and dipped 
it in blood, and you can easily see how that 
would spoil a beautiful coat. 



xviii.] THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS 195 

(c). They went and showed it to his father, 
all spoiled with the blood. 

Now let us try if we cannot apply the whole 
of this story to ourselves, and see how like 
Joseph we are, or ought to be. We have a 
Father, to Whom we speak whenever we say the 
Lord's Prayer, " Our Father Which art in 
Heaven," a Father Who has given us a Coat of 
Many Colours. When ? In our Baptism, when 
He gave to us the beautiful robe of Baptismal 
Grace. But perhaps some of you children are 
thinking, " Ah, you have made a mistake, for 
the robe of Baptismal Grace was a white robe, 
and this was a coat of many colours." Well, 
now let us see if we cannot get over that diffi- 
culty. I want you to think, dear children, of 
a ray of pure, white light, a sunbeam such as 
vou sometimes see coming through a chink in 
the shutters into your room, when the shatters 
have been partly closed to keep out the heat. 
Now, if you were to take a three-sided piece of 
glass, like the pendants which hang from a chan- 
delier, and which is called a "prism," and put it 



ig6 JOSEPH [xviii. 

in that ray of sunlight, you could break up that 
ray of white light into its component parts, and 
throw upon the wall the reflection of the seven 
colours which go to make up that ray of white 
light. For I suppose many of you know that 
white is really a composite colour, made up of 
all the other colours, so that we may think of 
our white robe of Baptismal Grace as made up 
of all the colours of the Christian Virtues, each 
brighter and more beautiful far than the colours 
of Joseph's coat. For instance, the virtues of 
Truth, Purity, Meekness, Humility, Honesty, 
Mercy, Obedience. Here we have seven of the 
most important virtues of a Christ-like soul, 
which we can think of as together making up 
our Coat of Many Colours -given us in our 
Baptism. 

I asked you to remember three questions 
about the Coat of Many Colours. What was 
the first ?— 

(1). Why did Jacob give Joseph this coat of 
many colours ? and the answer was, — Because 
he loved him ; and the cause of his love was, — 



xviii.] THE CO A T OF MANY COLOURS 197 



that Joseph was good. Now God gave us the 
great gift of Baptismal Grace because He loved 
us — not because we were good, but to help us to 
be good and because God was good — but after 
He has given it to us, God will love us all the 
more if we are good, and it would be very 
dreadful after having received so great a gift 
from God, so great a mark of His love, not to 
try very hard indeed to be good. While God 
in His goodness loves us even w T hen we are not 
good and loves every one, even those who are 
very sinful, yet we are quite sure that God must 
love us much more when He sees that we are 
trying to please Him, that we are trying to keep 
unsullied our Baptismal robe, trying to keep 
bright and beautiful the virtues of a Christian 
childhood. 

(2). Then the next question was, What was 
the result to Joseph of having this coat? and 
the answer was : — * 

(a). His brethren hated him. And so I am 
sorry to say, if we are good and keep our Baptis- 
mal robe unstained our bad companions and 



198 JOSEPH [xviii. 

brethren will hate us, because our virtues and 
example shame them. 

(b). They could not speak peaceably to him. 
So we may find, perhaps, bad children will say 
all manner of ill-natured things to us and tease us 
about our religion and ridicule us for striving to 
be good and try to make us angry and unhappy. 

(c). When they had an opportunity they took 
the coat away from him. So bad children, 
when they have an opportunity, by tempting us 
to sin will try to take away our Coat. 

(3). JSTow the third question was, What did 
the brethren do with the coat when they took 
it away from him ? 

(a). Did they wear it? No, they w T ere only 
envious and jealous and wanted to prevent him 
from having it. So our bad companions will 
not try to cultivate the virtues they see in us. 
They only want to rob us of them, because 
they are envious of us, because they know that 
God loves us, just as Cain was envious of Abel 
because God had respect to Abel's offering and 
not to Cain's. 



xviii.] THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS 199 

(b). They spoiled it by dipping it in blood. 
So they only try to spoil the virtues in us, 
tempting us to lie — one Colour spoiled, our 
Truthfulness; tempting us to be immodest — 
another gone, our Purity ; tempting us to steal, 
blotting out our Honesty ; tempting us to be 
angry, spoiling our Meekness ; tempting us to 
be vain, robbing us of our Humility ; tempting 
ns to be cruel, injuring our Mercy ; tempting us 
to be be disobedient, and so on until one after 
the other all the beautiful Colours are ruined. 

(c). They went and showed it to his father, 
spoiled. So when they have robbed us of our 
Coat of Many Colours they will point with 
pleasure to their work and say, u There is the 
good child who goes to Church so regularly and 
says her prayers, see how angry and untruthful 
and vain she is becoming ! " 

So you see, my dear children, that the story 
of Joseph's Coat of Many Colours is the story 
of our own life ; that we must realize that we 
are among wicked brethren, and the very fact 
of our wishing to be good and having gifts of 



JOSEPH 



[xviii. 



grace which they have not, will only make them 
strive the harder to tempt us and try to spoil 
our good gifts. We most guard our Coat of 
Many Colours most carefully by self-examina- 
tion every night to see if any one of the colours 
has been injured during the day, and if so by 
repentance we must try to wash away the stain 
from it, so that our Father in Heaven may look 
down upon us and see us carefully preserving 
the Coat of Many Colours which He gave us in 
our Baptism as a mark of His love. You know, 
dear children, that there is a parable about a 
Marriage Supper in which one of the guests had 
not on a wedding garment, and so was cast into 
outer darkness, that is, was lost. Our Coat of 
Many Colours, given us in Baptism, through 
the discipline of life and the other gifts of God's 
grace is to become the Wedding Garment of our 
soul at the Marriage Feast of the Lamb, our 
Lord Jesus Christ, in His Kingdom in Heaven, 
that is, we are through temptations resisted and 
trials borne and prayers said and Sacraments 
continually used, to work into our Coat of Many 



xviii.] THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS 201 

Colours, as it were, the character which is to be 
our glory in Heaven. If we lose by sin our 
Baptismal Kobe of innocence we must strive at 
once to get it back by earnest penitence ; if we 
find upon it any stain, we must w T ash that stain 
away in the Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus 
Christ ; for if we lose the Robe given to us in 
Baptism in the struggle of life, we cannot have 
the Wedding Garment at the last; but if w 7 e 
preserve it through all the conflicts of this world, 
if we defend it from all the assaults of our many 
foes, then the Robe of Baptism will become the 
Wedding Garment in which we shall sit down 
at the Marriage Feast of our Lord Jesus Christ 
in that glorious day when He comes with all 
His Angels and Saints to welcome His children 
home into the Kingdom prepared for them by 
their Father's love. 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Jacob gave Joseph a coat of many colours, 
i. Why ? Because he loved him. 
ii. What was the result to Joseph of having 
this coat ? 



202 



JOSEPH 



[xviii. 



1. His brethren hated him. 

2. Would not speak peaceably to him. 

3. Took the coat away from him. 
iii. What did his brethren do with the coat ? 

1. Did they wear it ? 

2. They spoiled it, 

3. and showed it to his father all 

spoiled. 

II. God, our Father, gave us in Baptism a 
Coat of Many Colours. When ? What w r ere the 
Colours ? Apply all the above points to our- 
selves. 

III. We must guard our Coat most carefully, 
if any Colour is injured by sin, restore it by 
penitence ; for our Baptismal Robe after the dis- 
cipline of life must become the Wedding Gar- 
ment with which we enter Heaven. 



XIX 

JOSEPH— II 

ADVERSITY 

" And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his 
brethren, that they stript Joseph out of his coat, his coat 
of many colours that was on him; and they took him, 
and cast him into a pit : and the pit was empty, there was 

no water in it Then there passed by Midianites 

merchantmen ; and they drew and lifted up Joseph out 
of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmeelites for twenty 
pieces of silver: and they brought Joseph into Egypt." — 
Gen. xxxvii. 23-29. 

Lsr ray last sermon we took that part of Joseph's 

history which was associated with his coat of 

many colours, that is to say, with his childhood ; 

and a very happy childhood it was, for he had a 

father who loved him very dearly, and a good 

mother. But as his childhood drew to a close, 

sorrow began to come into bis life, for when he 

was sixteen years old, about a year before he 

was sold by his brethren, he lost his mother 

(203) 



204 JOSEPH [xix. 

Rachel, and as sorrows seldom come alone he 
was now to be tried by the deepest adversity. 

His father sent him to inquire after his breth- 
ren, and he found them at Dothan, and when 
they saw him coming, they conspired against 
him to slay him. But Reuben, who wished to 
save his life, suggested that he should be cast 
into a pit and left there, intending himself 
afterwards to talie him out of the pit. While 
he was in the pit, Judah proposed that they 
should sell him to the Ishmaelites, a caravan of 
whom were passing on their way to Egypt ; and 
so like our Lord, of Whom he was a type, he 
was sold by his brethren — for twenty pieces of 
silver. These Ishmaelites in their turn, when 
they reached Egypt sold him as a slave to Poti- 
phar, Captain of the King's Guard. 

What a change ! From a happy boy in his 
father's house, the favorite son of a great prince, 
to the condition of a slave in a foreign land, 
and all by no fault of his own, but by the 
treachery of his wicked brethren. Think of the 
sadness of those first few days of slavery ! Some 



xix.] ADVERSITY 205 

would have spent their time in brooding over 
their wrongs, bitterly resenting their servitude, 
and only doing sullenly what they were com- 
pelled to do. How differently Joseph acted ! 
Few could have felt the bitterness of slavery 
more than he, for he had been brought up in 
all the freedom of the w T andering life of his 
countrymen, and had been the recipient of his 
father's love. But in his great adversity he ex- 
hibits two rules of conduct which I want you, 
dear children, to remember as the right rules to 
live by in time of trouble. Joseph determines 
that if he cannot be happy, at least he will be 
useful, and will be good. 

(1). He determines to be useful. So he goes 
to his work as a slave with such industry and 
care that very soon he rises to be the overseer 
of the whole house. God blesses his efforts 
and he becomes Potiphar's steward, and from 
the fact that we are distinctly told that God 
blessed him, we may be very sure that in all 
his adversity he thought of God, that he let his 
very troubles drive him to God in prayer, as 



206 JOSEPH [xix. 

troubles always should. The Psalmist says: 
"It is good for me that 1 have teen in trouble : 
that I may learn thy statutes" (Ps. cxix. 71); 
and this is the true use of trouble, to help us to 
learn more of God arid of His ways of dealing 
with us. 

(2). But just as the darkness seemed to be 
passing away and brighter times were dawning 
on Joseph's life, a great temptation befell him. 
Potiphar's wife tempted him to commit a great 
sin. Now you know I told you that the other 
thing that Joseph in his adversity kept before 
him was a determination to be good — to be use- 
ful, and to be good ; and therefore he at once 
resisted the temptation, remembering God's 
Presence and saying to Potiphar's wife, "How 
can I do this great wickedness, and sin against 
God?" (Gen. xxxix, 9). She tempted him 
again and again, from day to day; still he re- 
membered God's Presence and never yielded in 
the least. Now this was hard enough, to be 
so tempted, and we should perhaps think that 
he deserved to have been rewarded by God for 



xix.] ADVERSITY 207 

his goodness, instead of which he was punished 
for it ; for Potiphar's wife accused him of the 
very sin which he refused to commit, and he 
was cast into prison, and so was punished, not 
for doing wrong but for refusing to do wrong. 
His lot as a slave had seemed hard enough, but 
now he was in prison, and in such a prison ! — for 
in those days, dear children, prisoners were not 
treated as kindly as they are now. But again 
Joseph began to live by his two rules in adver- 
sity — to try to be useful and to be good, and he 
made himself so useful that the keeper of the 
prison committed all the prisoners and all that 
there was in the prison to Joseph's care. And 
here, no doubt, he found opportunities of 
lightening the hard lot of some of his fellow- 
prisoners, and became like a sunbeam in that 
dark, gloomy prison. 

The lesson for us, dear children, is very 
simple and very clear. Many of us will have 
sooner or later to undergo trouble and adver- 
sity. Some, perhaps, even as children know 
what it is now to have a hard, sad lot, perhaps 



208 JOSEPH [xix. 

from poverty, or loss of parents, or sickness, or 
some other cause, and the danger is lest we 
should become sullen and disheartened and 
complaining. Think of Joseph and learn from 
him to say : " Well, if my life is to be hard and 
sad, I will at least try to help other people, try 
to make their lives brighter, try to be useful, 
and above all, I will try to be good. I will try 
to bear my cross lovingly, for the sake of Him 
Who died on the Cross for me ; not looking for 
a reward in this world, but remembering that 
if I suffer wdth Christ patiently I shall reign 
w T ith Him gloriously." 

But as if all this were not enough, poor Jo- 
seph had yet one more trial. Among his fel- 
low-prisoners were the Butler and the Baker of 
the King of Egypt. They dreamed, you re- 
member, two strange dreams, and they told 
their dreams to Joseph, and Joseph interpreted 
their dreams, that is, God showed him what 
they meant. Now the Butler said : "In my 
dream, behold, a vine was before me ; and in 
the vine were three branches: and it was as 



xix.] ADVERSITY 209 

though it budded, and her blossoms shot forth / 
and the clusters thereof brought forth ripe 
grapes : and Pharaoh's cup was in my hand : 
and I took the grapes, and pressed them into 
Pharaoh's cup, and I gave the cup into Pha- 
raoh's hand. And Joseph said unto him, 
This is the interpretation of it: The three 
branches are three days : yet within three days 
shall Pharaoh lift up thine head, and restore 
thee unto thy place: and thou shalt deliver 
Pharaoh's cup into his hand, after the former 
manner when thou wast his butler" (Gen xl. 
9-14). 

" When the chief baker saw that the interpret 
tation was good, he said unto Joseph, 1 also 
was in my dream, and, behold, I had three 
white baskets on my head : and in the upper- 
most basket there was of all manner of bake- 
meats for Pharaoh ; and the birds did eat 
them out of the basket upon my head. And 
Joseph answered and said, This is the inter- 
pretation thereof : The three baskets are three 
days: yet within three days shall Pharaoh 



210 JOSEPH [xix. 

lift up thy head from off thee, and shall hang 
thee on a tree / and the birds shall eat thy flesh 
from off thee" (Verses 16-20). 

£Tow when Joseph had foretold to the Butler 
the happy termination of his imprisonment, he 
made this pathetic request of him : u Think on 
one when it shall he well with thee, and shew 
kindness, I pray thee, unto me, and make men- 
tion of me unto Pharaoh, and bring me out of 
this house : for indeed 1 was stolen away out 
of the land of the Hebrews : and here also have 
1 done nothing that they should put me into 
the dungeon " (Verses 14, 15). 

Three days after this, on Pharaoh's birthday, 
the Butler was sent for and restored to his po- 
sition, and the Baker w T as hanged. Think what 
hopes this must have raised in Joseph ! Each 
day he w T aited, expecting that his friend the 
Butler would remember him and bring about 
his deliverance ; but we are told : " Yet did not 
the chief butler remember Joseph, but forgat 
him " (Verse 23). 

This was the last step in the downward path 



xix.] ADVERSITY 211 

of Joseph's long trial, for thirteen years had 
passed since his sorrows began. First there had 
been his brethren's cruelty, then his mistress's 
treachery, now his fellow-prisoner's ingratitude 
and forgetfulness. And yet through it all we 
may be quite sure that Joseph felt that if it was 
God's Will that he should suffer, it was right, 
and that he did not give way to useless com- 
plaints, that he did not give up trying to be 
useful and trying to be good; and we know 
that though he was greatly afflicted, God had a 
very great reward in store for him. So it 
always is, for St. Paul tells us, in the fourth 
chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinth- 
ians, and the seventeenth and eighteenth verses, 
that " Our light affliction, which is hut for a 
moment, workeih for us a far more exceeding 
and eternal weight of glory ; while we look not 
at the things which are seen, hut at the things 
which are not seen : for the things which are 
seen are temporal; hut the things which are 
not seen are eternal" So try to bear your sor- 
rows and trials, that they may work for you a 



212 JOSEPH [xix. 

great reward, if not in this world, in the world 
the rewards of which are eternal ; and that you 
may be able to do so, look not at the things 
which are seen, that is, not merely at the trials 
themselves, but at the things which are not 
seen, at the glorious results of all trial in that 
Kingdom of Love where those who have sown 
in tears shall reap in joy ; where those who 
have suffered here shall reign in glory with 
Christ hereafter. 

ANALYSIS. 

Joseph's sorrows begin with his mother's 
death and follow close on one another. 

I. He is sold by his brethren to the Ishmael- 
ites, and by them to Potiphar as a slave. 

His two rules in adversity to be useful and 
to be good. 

i. The first soon raises him to the head of 

Potiphar's house, 
ii. The second saves him from a great sin. 

II. He is cast into prison and there still 
keeps his two rules. 



xix.] ADVERSITY 213 

i. The Butler's promise and Joseph's disap- 
pointment, 
ii. We must expect trouble some day, let us 
learn from Joseph how to meet it. 



XX 

JOSEPH— III 

PROSPERITY 

"And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, Forasmuch as God 
hath shewed thee all this, there is none so discreet and 
wise as thou art : thou shalt be over my house, and ac- 
cording unto thy word shall all my people be ruled: only 
in the throne will I be greater than thou. And Pharaoh 
said unto Joseph, See, I have set thee over all the land of 
Egypt. And Pharaoh took off his ring from his hand, 
and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vest- 
ures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck ; 
and he made him to ride in the second chariot which he 
had ; and they cried before him, Bow the knee: and he 
made him ruler over all the land of Egypt." — Gen. xli. 
39-44. 

We left Joseph in the prison with a most hope- 
less future before him, treated with ingratitude 
by the Butler, who had forgotten him, but still, 
no doubt, trying to be useful and trying to be 

good. Two full years rolled by, and at last de- 

(214) 



xx.] PROSPERITY 215 

liverance came, and such a deliverance as Jo- 
seph had never expected ! 

Pharaoh, King of Egypt, dreamed two 
dreams. First, that as he stood beside the 
River Nile, seven well-favored and fat fleshed 
kine came out of the river and fed in the 
meadow, and after them seven other kine, ill- 
favored and lean fleshed ; and these ill-favored 
and lean fleshed kine eat up the seven well- 
favored and fat kine ; and Pharaoh awoke. 
And the second time he dreamed, and behold, 
seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, 
rank and good ; and seven thin ears, blasted 
with the east wind, sprung up after them, and 
the thin ears devoured the full ears ; and again 
Pharaoh awoke, and it was a dream. In the 
morning he sent for the magicians of Egypt 
and all the wise men, but none of them could 
interpret the dreams to Pharaoh. Then the 
Chief Butler remembered how Joseph had in- 
terpreted his dream, and he told Pharaoh of 
Joseph and how Joseph's interpretation of the 
dream of the vine with three branches had been 



2i6 JOSEPH [xx. 

fulfilled ; and so Pharaoh sent and called for 
Joseph, and they brought him out of his prison 
and put on him proper clothes, and he appeared 
before Pharaoh. 

Pharaoh told him that he had dreamed a 
dream and that no one could interpret it, and 
asked Joseph if he could, and Joseph replied : 
"It is not in me : God shall give Pharaoh an 
a/nswer of peace" (Gen. xli. 16). Then Pha- 
raoh told Joseph his dreams, and Joseph told 
him that they meant that there was to be first 
seven years of great plenty in the land of Egypt, 
and then seven years of great famine, during 
which all the corn that had been saved during 
the time of plenty would be consumed, and he 
advised Pharaoh to appoint some discreet and 
wise man over the land of Egypt to gather into 
garners and store up all the corn that could be 
spared during the seven years of plenty, in 
preparation for the years of famine ; and then, 
as my text tells you, Pharaoh appointed Joseph 
to do this work and in addition made him ruler 
over all the land of Egypt. 



xx.] PROSPERITY 217 

Thus began Joseph's prosperity. He was 
thirty years of age at this time, and the last 
thirteen years of his life had been years of sor- 
row, slavery, and imprisonment. But with 
prosperity came a new form of temptation — 
the temptation to be selfish. It is easier, my 
dear children, to bear adversity with patience 
and fortitude than to bear prosperity with hu- 
mility and unselfishness. There are many who 
are sanctified, that is to say, made saints of, by 
suffering and trial, by bearing the cross; but 
how few there are who are sanctified by riches ! 
When we look around upon the world, upon 
the prosperous and rich, and see how they 
spend almost all their money upon themselves, 
in parading their own grandeur or ministering 
to their own desires, like the rich man in our 
Lord's parable, clothed in purple and fine linen 
and faring sumptuously every day and passing 
unheeded the Lazarus, the poor at their gates — 
when we think what a wonderful opportunity 
for good is given them, how much suffering 
they might alleviate, how much sorrow and hard- 



218 JOSEPH [xx. 

ship they might minister to, and yet they do it 
not, is it not sad? They think their money is 
their own, to do what they please with, but they 
forget that they are but God's stewards. There 
is only one Rich Man ; there never has been 
but one ; all the rest are stewards. You can 
tell me, can you not, dear children, the Name 
of that one Rich Man ? — our Lord Jesus Christ, 
to Whom all things belong. The richest man 
that ever lived in this world was only our 
Lord's steward, and one day he, like all of us, 
will have to give an account for every gift and 
opportunity committed to his charge. But, 
alas ! the rich forget this, and they forget, too, 
that they can carry nothing out of this world, 
and that their true wisdom and true happiness 
is so to use the goods that God has committed 
to their care as realizing that they must give 
up their stewardship and give an account of all 
they have done before the Throne of the 
Great Judge. They must show how they 
have used their talent. Yes, to be rich means 
to have a great temptation to use our riches 



xx.] PROSPERITY 219 

as though they were our own, and to become 
selfish. 

Now the world had dealt so hardly with Jo- 
seph that if he had not been very good he 
might have argued that, as the world had 
treated him with cruelty, treachery, and ingrat- 
itude, he owed it no debt, and would use his 
wealth and position simply for self -gratifica- 
tion, simply to make up for the evil days 
through which he had passed so patiently. But 
as Joseph remembered God in adversity and 
then strove not to be discontented but to be 
useful and good, so did he in prosperity, and 
realizing that he was God's steward, he devoted 
himself with the greatest diligence and wisdom 
to works of charity and benevolence. Carefully 
he stored the corn during the seven plentiful 
years, in preparation for the seven years of fam- 
ine, and while this is all that we are directly told 
in the Bible, yet from what we know of Joseph 
and from the great esteem in which he was evi- 
dently held in Egypt, we may be sure that as 
ruler in Egypt he introduced a great many wise 



220 JOSEPH [xx. 

reforms for the good of the people in that 
country. 

But he had one great sorrow still, and that 
was the separation from his father. Joseph's 
affection for his father stands out most patheti- 
cally in his whole history. He had been his 
father's best-loved child, and his affectionate 
and grateful nature never forgot the love which 
his father lavished upon him in his boyhood. 
So, though many years had passed, he still 
thought of his father, wondered whether he 
were yet alive, whether he would ever see him 
again. 

Now we are told that when the years of 
famine came, Joseph not only saved the lives of 
the Egyptians by letting them have the corn 
which he had stored in the granaries, but that 
the people from all the countries round about 
came to buy corn in Egypt, and amongst others, 
you know, his brethren came. Here was a trial 
of Joseph's generosity and forbearance! His 
brethren now were absolutely in his power ; they 
had wronged him most shamefully, had sold him 



xx.] PROSPERITY 221 

as a slave, and now they were in his Lands, to 
punish them either by taking their lives or by 
reducing them to the same slavery to which they 
had doomed him. But instead of this, he treats 
them with the greatest kindness ; he weeps with 
joy to see them, he tenderly inquires after his 
old father and his brother Benjamin, who was a 
baby scarcely a year old when he left home. He 
sends them to fetch Benjamin, retaining two of 
them as hostages, and then when Benjamin has 
come he devises a scheme to test the reality of 
their penitence, to prove whether they were 
better men than before. And finally, after 
making himself known to them, he sends wag- 
ons to bring his father, and obtains from the 
King a large and rich tract of country for them 
to live in. So he returns good for evil, and 
gladly forgives their sins against him. 

But what I want you specially to notice, dear 
children, is the way in which Joseph's reward 
was the direct result of his own unselfish life. 
At the crisis, when he became rich and prosper- 
ous and had to face the temptation of selfishness 



222 JOSEPH [xx 

and pride, he devoted his well-earned power 
and prosperity to doing good to others, to stor- 
ing up corn ready for the famine, so as to save 
the poor from suffering, and to improving the 
condition of the people whom he governed, and 
it was through this first good act that he found 
his father, — for if he had not stored up the 
corn his brothers would not have been led to 
Egypt. Then with his father and brethren 
around him, and happy in his own children 
Ephraim and Manasseh, he lived to a good old 
age, revered and loved alike by his countrymen 
and by the Egyptians, who went mourning for 
him at his death. 

But before we take leave of Joseph, let me 
remind you, dear children, that he was one of 
the greatest types of our Lord in the Bible. 

(1). Sent by his father to his brethren, they 
take counsel against him, reject him, strip him 
of his raiment, and sell him. 

(2). He becomes a slave. St. Paul tells us of 
our Blessed Lord that He " made himself of no 
reputation^ and took upon him the form of 



xx.] PROSPERITY 223 

a servant, and was made in the likeness of 
men " (Phil. ii. 7). 

(3). He is cast into prison. This typifies our 
Lord's visit to the Prison of the Intermediate 
State, when on Holy Saturday He brought out 
the Prisoners of Hope, the Fathers of the Old 
Covenant, who were waiting there for His Re- 
demption. 

(4). Joseph between the Baker and the Butler, 
one of whom was to be exalted and the other to 
be lost, pictures our Lord's work upon the Cross 
with the two thieves, to one of whom He fore- 
told : "To-day shalt thou he with me in para- 
dise" (St. Luke xxiii. 43) ; while the other died 
in impenitence and blasphemy. 

(5). Joseph, taken from prison, is exalted to 
the right hand of the King. Here we have our 
Lord's Resurrection and Ascension. 

(6). And then from his throne, Joseph saves 
the lives of his brethren by giving them corn in 
the time of famine. So our Lord, from His 
Kingdom in Heaven, comes down upon our 
Altars to feed us with the Blessed Sacrament of 



224 JOSEPH [xx. 

His own Body and Blood (of Which that corn 
was the type) that our souls may not be starved 
in the famine which prevails in this world. 

(7). Then last of all and best of all,. Joseph is 
the only character without any flaw. Of all the 
other types of our Lord we know of some sin 
which they committed, but of Joseph we know 
of none, and in this especially is he a type of 
Christ, Who was without sin, Who was perfect. 

So, my children, we can learn much from the 
study of these Old Testament characters. Some 
people would look upon them as simply stories 
without much value, but I think we can see 
how every one of them has a lesson for us, and 
a lesson as good as we can find in any part of 
the Bible. May God grant that some of these 
lessons which we have been striving to learn to- 
gether from the Book of Genesis may be so en- 
grafted in our hearts that they may bring forth 
good fruit in our lives, to the glory of God and 
the sanctification of our own souls ! 



xx.] PROSPERITY 225 

ANALYSIS. 

I. Hardly three years passed after the Baker's 
release before Joseph was delivered. 

i. Pharaoh's two dreams and Joseph's inter- 
pretation of them, 
ii. Joseph made ruler of the kingdom and 

charged to store up the corn. 
iii. The dangers of prosperity — pride and self- 
ishness. Only one really Rich Man, all 
others stewards. 

II. Joseph's industry and benevolence, the 
antidote to riches. 

i. His one sorrow, the loss of his father ; the 

reward of his unselfish work for others 

that it becomes the means of re-uniting 

him to his father. 

ii. Joseph in seven ways a great type of Christ. 



